Narrative Research in Time - THIS IS PAGE INDEX - Click and Go

Our proposed All Academy Session Symposium will examine how narrative research might be utilized in the conference’s mandate to explore the relationship between time and organization studies. People tell stories in and of organizations that combine two essential qualities — time and plot. According to Paul Ricoeur’s (1984) work on time and narrative, the plot of a story "grasps together" and organizes goals, means and ends, initiatives and actions, intended and unintended consequences, causes, and chance within a "temporal unity." The plot encircles action with time, sets out the unintended consequences, legislates the goals and principles, assimilates the predictions, and sets the mimesis of a story through pre-understanding and poetic composition. The story is always about a giving human experience a temporal character. In stories, "time becomes human time" (Ricoeur, 1984, p. 3). The plot of an organizational story "grasps together" into a coherent whole, the multiple and fragmented, experiences and events, agents and victims, chances and causes, goals and motives, surprise and necessity, better and worse reversals of fortune, ends and means that make up an organizational story. This symposium of narrative researchers will present some of the many ways organizational members combine time and plot to create the storytelling organization. Our goal is to present narrative research in practice as panel members explore research stories of organizational life.

Narrative, Time, Storytelling

We request that the symposium be provided with 1 hour and 40 minutes. This time will be divided in the following way: (a) 10 minutes for an overview of the symposium and introduction of the panel members; (b) 15 minutes per presentation (four presentations for a total of 60 minutes); and, (c) 30 for audience discussion and participation. The emphasis will be on interactive questioning and participatory discussions among presenters and with the audience.

Our symposium will examine how narrative research might be utilized in the conference’s mandate to explore "time," and address the exploration of time in organizational life. Before reading each of our panel presentations, we believe that the issue of time in narrative requires a visit to the writings of Paul Ricoeur.

Ricoeur (1984) combines a theory of time from Augustine with a theory of plot from Aristotle in a way that provides us a powerful theory of storytelling. Organizational stories have a memory of events past, and attention on what is being unfolded, and an expectation of how events will unfold. These three aspects, memory, attention and expectation, come from Augustine and are related to Aristotle’s theory of emplotment and mimesis. People tell stories of organizations that compose events into plots, and they engage in mimesis (imitation) by trying to shape actions to mimic plots.

There are two essential qualities in stories: time and plot. The plot of a story "grasps together" and organizes goals, means and ends, initiatives and actions, intended and unintended consequences, causes, and chance within a "temporal unity" (Ricoeur, 1984, pp. ix-x). When Aristotle asks: "What then is time?," the being and non-being of time takes the stage. As Ricoeur summarizes the skeptical argument that is now well known, "time has no being since the future is not yet, the past is no longer, and the present does not remain" (1984, p. 7). Then Aristotle asks: "How can time exist if the past is no longer, if the future is not yet, and if the present is not always?" Augustine’s answer is the concept of a threefold present: (1) Memory — recounting stories brings out the memory of things, as they were retrospectively ordered in the past; (2) Attention — stories give attention to the indivisible instant that is passing from the future into the past; and, (3) Expectation — stories invoke expectations, predictions of what we foresee being unfolded.

One contribution of Ricoeur to the overview of our symposium is to focus our attention on the poetics of storytelling, moving us away from the logos-based, happy, harmonious stories told in Western textbooks and organization journals to stories concerning pathos and ethos. Stories with reversals, darkness, feeling, and tragic plots. Many changes of fortune involve tragic unhappiness. Yet, heroines and heroes in organizational texts are presented without fault, attaining excellence and progress without vice or wickedness, totally responsible for organizational prosperity.

In order to propose five amendments to Ricoeur, let me summarize the relationship between three memetic punctuations of time and narrative:

The dialectic of time and narrative depends on M₁, a preunderstanding (comprised of action network, symbolic mediation & narrative temporality), with M₂, emplotment (constituted by mediation of event and story, heterogeneous factors & synthesis of heterogeneity) together with M₃, temporality (of the hermeneutic circle in relation to the spiral of these three moments of mimesis) [Source: Chapter 7 of Boje, 2000 Narrative and Ante-Narrative, a book in press by Sage London].

For Ricoeur, time is circular, in a "circle of memesis:" In the Circle of Mimesis the end point (temporality) leads back to (or anticipates) the starting points, our pre-understandings (semantic structure of action, resources for symbolization, or temporal character) across the mid-point (emplotment). Here is how Ricoeur refers to each:

Mimesis_{1 -} For Ricoeur (1984: 64) "To imitate or represent action is to preunderstand what human acting is, in its semantics, its symbolic system, its temporality" (Ricoeur, 1984: 64). . Pre-understanding networks questions of "what," "why," "who," "how," "with whom," or "against whom" in regard to a given action (p. 55). In antenarrative these questions go answered. Example: Frank (1995: 98) to refer to the "chaos narrative" as an "antenarrative… a telling without mediation, and speaking about oneself without being fully able to reflect on oneself."

Mimesis_{2 -} Ricoeur prefers the word "emplotment" to "plot" for this stage of mimesis. Emplotment here is the "grasping together" of the elements (events, factors & time episodes) to enact narrative configuration and thereby accomplish the mediation between the earlier and latter stages of mimesis. Emplotment is constructed out of M₁ this pre-understanding of networks of actions, symbolic mediation, and being-within-time and a postunderstanding (M₃). 

Mimesis_{3 -} Ricoeur (1984: 700) says narrative "has its full meaning when it is restored to the time of action and of suffering in mimesis₃."  In this third representative stage H. G. Gadamer's hermeneutics of "application" the triadic cycle of meaning is fulfilled in the three-dimensional intersection (or intertextuality) of text and reader and real action.

Boje's Amendments to Paul Ricoeur's Narrative and Time

In my introductory remarks, I wish to make connections between the five amendments to Paul Ricoeur's Narrative and Time book and the book by Howard Aldrich on Evolution (and his remarks yesterday at the Toronto meeting): 

1. Cunliffe's First Amendment: Be it resolved that M1, M2 & M3 happen at the same time and over time. The threads of earlier conversations (M1) weave together into their emplotments (M2) and these are under continual revision (M3).Time and narrative are imposed constructs onto our human experience. We might call this the Free Speech Time amendment.

2. Luhman's Second Amendment: Be it resolved that time and narrative is multiple and fragmented. The relationship of the three mimetics is intertextual. We might call this the Freedom of Association (of texts and moments of time) amendment.

3. Kramer's Third Amendment: Be it resolved the three memetics are negotiated in ongoing processes of power and politics. People revise historical narratives and their experience of time past, present, and future. We could call this the right to collective bargaining. 

4. Barry and Carroll's Fourth Amendment: Be it resolved in the narrative research fads and fashions we are now at M1, we were at M2 functionalism, and we could be at M3 contextualization of the meaning of time and narrative. We could call this the right to choose our narrative and temporal orientation, or just right to choose.

5. Hatch and Barrett's 5th Amendment: Be it resolved that Ricoeur's model lacks a phenomenological experience of narrative and time. It is far too modernist and analytic for symbolic interpretativists and postmodernists.  This could be call the right to rhythm and to perspectival experience.

To me there are implications of the five amendments to Howard Aldrich's new book on evolution. IN his speech to the OMT division of the Academy in Toronto (August 7, 2000), Aldrich stressed the importance of timing, pacing, duration of our research on organizations. he recommended that we focus on event-driven instead of outcome-driven research. In outcome-driven research we invent a story from retrospective data points to justify and legitimate a particular outcome. In event-driven research we recognize that we are looking for people, records, and talking traces that are no longer there. Howard says "people who know outcomes can build beautiful stories as to what happened and make them coherent."  This is similar to Ricoeur's notion of the circle of the three memetic moments. We are always losing the pre-narrated record, renarrating the emplotments, and reapprehending and rehistoricizing in the third memetic. Where I part company with Howard is in the following.

1. I do not believe that asking the same question in a time series will necessarily get at the truth of history and evolution. Rather I see multiple linesof history, and depending upon whose story we retrace, we get a different emplotment. I asked Howard the following two questions at the Toronto presentation.

2. In microstoria (in Italy) the point is to tell the story of the "little people" not the leaders or elites' history. And true to the five amendments, microstoria is not concerned with re-interpreting history with a theory abstracted from the present and reinscribed onto the past.  They are not interest in showing a progress (or regress) narrative. Howard argues that tracing history won't work because the historical record is only partial. While this is true, it is not the entire story. Rather, in microstoria research such as the plight of some poor peasant in an inquisition and torture event, there is a transcribed record, we can trace out some, but not all of the family situation, and the competing discourses of that time and place. 

3. Major corporations are still important to study.  A corporation such as Nike, spends $7500 million a year on advertising and is writing the historical record data base that is making its way in retrospective apprehension onto the pages of American management and organization theory texts, onto the storyteller pages of the Wall Street Journal, an  into Harvard case studies. 

Howard Alrdrich's points are about taking our time to see how processes unfold, and paying particular attention to ascertaining the relevant time interval (seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, or eras).  Yet, to me the five amendments to Ricoeur point to the impossibility of such a project.  The project assumes there is a universal and essentalist foundation of time, when I am assuming a multi-faceted, polysemous, and intertextual one. Who decides when we have arrived at a duration? Is it the executive's history and rhythm of time or the workers' or some social scientist? At issue is the phenomenological experience of time and the social construction and negotiation of narrative. At issue is the power to tell the story and to calibrate the intervals of time. The beauty of Ricoeur is this is a circularity not a universality or linearity of time or narrative emplotment.  

What I appreciated in Howard Aldrich's answers to my questions was his acknowledgement that while Nike corporate advertising is writing the history of its corporation onto the pages of organization and management texts, there are important social movements out there seeking to correct and renegotiate the historical record. It was a great presentation, but one that straws for a theory of evolution and time that squares with Ricoeur. 

Our first panelist, Cunliffe, discusses how time is a crucial, yet often taken-for-granted aspect of research because much of our interpretation of organizational life, of what organizational actors do and who they are, takes place out of time, after the moment of acting. In other words, although we try to plan life (and research) in advance, we live life in the moment, and we make sense after the event -- yet we often claim our theorizing is grounded in reality. Cunliffe, will offer illustrations from her own attempts to incorporate the immediacy of time and experience, through social poetics, at various ‘moments’ in her research. The second panelist, Luhman, demonstrates how a successful organizational vision statement requires "kairos," in that it must reflect accurately, and with enough communicative power, the organization’s ability to capture market opportunities.

Kramer, our third panelist, is interested in developing a scheme with which to study organizations as ongoing discursive constructs whereby the past and future are continually negotiated. He discusses the discursive and rhetorical attempts to maintain an organizational identity over time while also embracing change. The final panelists, Barry and Carroll, discuss a "new time" platform in the narrative turn in organizational studies. Rather than viewing this new time platform as a linear act with a beginning and an end, the panelists look for the cyclical rise and fall and recurring beginnings and ends in the narrative study of organizations.

The next section provides a synopsis of each of the panel presentations. Please note that the references for each synopsis are combined into a complete list at the end of this document.

Social Poetics: Making Sense in the Moment and after the Moment

Ann L. Cunliffe

University of New Hampshire

The notion of time raises fundamental questions about the nature of our research processes, practices and theorizing. The issue of time is especially rooted in narrative research because of its underlying epistemological priorities, as Geertz summarizes: capturing the complex, emergent and relational nature of social experience as it occurs. We need to surface and explore the impact of time as an inherent part of the research process, and one way of doing so involves engaging with social constructionism in its most radically reflexive form (Pollner, 1991). I will outline the main suppositions of this approach and its impact on research, particularly on minimizing time/space distance between researcher and participant, living moment and making sense, and acting and theorizing. I will offer examples from my own attempts to embrace the questions that time raises when carrying out fieldwork, interpreting ‘data’ and writing up narrative studies. Specifically, I suggest social poetics may offer a starting point for developing practices within narrative research that remain sensitive to the effects of time.

Time is a crucial, yet often taken-for-granted aspect of research because much of our interpretation of organizational life, of what organizational actors do and who they are, takes place out of time, after the moment of acting. In other words, although we try to plan life (and research) in advance, we live life in the moment, and we make sense after the event -- yet we often claim our theorizing is grounded in reality. Conventional epistemologies are legitimated by their very ability to create distance in time by developing explanations that are not limited to the moment of observation, are generalized across time and context, and allow predictions about future behavior. This presupposes a clear distinction between ontology and epistemology, that how we come to know the world is separate from our moment of experiencing it. Narrative research embraces the supposition that knowledge is a social, historical and linguistic process in which the facticity of a reality and a time is replaced by intersubjective and emerging realities. Social life is recognized as multiply-enacted narratives, an ongoing accomplishment created and sustained by people living their lives (Weick 1995). Thus, time is fluid, emerging and elusive. Broadly speaking, these suppositions have led to narrative scholars drawing attention to the process of constructing knowledge and its impact on research practices, for example: challenging meta narratives (Lyotard 1984, Knights 1992), exploring how narratives of theory and practice are constituted (Czarniawska 1997, Downing 1997, Gergen 1998, O’Connor 1999, Philips and Hardy 1997), emphasizing plurivocality in meaning and interpretation (Boje 1995, Hatch 1996), exploring the dialogical construction of realities and meaning (Hatch 1997, Katz and Shotter 1996, Watson 1995).

Even though narrative scholars focus on the research process, there are still a number of implicit time-based dilemmas:

1. How can we capture moments in which meaning is created?

2. Is it possible to develop ‘methods’ or forms of discourse to help us uncover how we (as researchers and ‘subjects’) construct meaning in the moment?

3. How can we write about lived experience when writing freezes time and experience?

4. If meaning is created in the moment of speaking then by interpreting and explaining after the event we are creating different meanings and moving further away from any ‘original’ experience. So what or who is our research about?

Can we ever hope to devise the form of discourse Geertz suggests, one which keeps up with the moment and somehow captures the complex, intertextual, emerging nature of living or do we accept we inevitably make sense of narratives and stories out of time and context?

Drawing on social constructionist suppositions, and particularly the work of Shotter (1993, 1996, 1998), I suggest our social world and sense of self are constructed between us in our relational activities, specifically, in "oral encounter and reciprocal speech" (Shotter, 1993, p. 29). Talk, in the moment, is therefore the primary medium of constructing and making sense of our social and organizational realities, both in and after the fact. Radically reflexive social constructionism involves recognizing that our research itself is a socially constructed narrative -- one that is constructed in many moments by many people. From this perspective, organizations (both business and academic) may be seen as relational landscapes continually shifting from the imaginary to the imagined in interactive moments (Shotter and Billig 1998) and management and research as responsive, embodied and dialogical activities of managing and researching. Social poetics elevates everyday ways of talking, taken-for-granted utterances, and how they may move us to talk or act in different ways both as we speak in and after the moment. While incorporating narrative methods, for example, how we use metaphors, storytelling, analogies, images, and instructive statements to connect with others, social poetics focuses initially on the moment of speaking and the embodied and responsive nature of conversation. Social poetics explores how the embodied and rhetorical impact of poetic language helps create a sense of our surroundings as researcher-participants and participant-researchers.

I will offer illustrations from my own attempts to incorporate the immediacy of time and experience, through social poetics, at various ‘moments’ in my research: field work, interpretation and writing. For example, at the fieldwork/interpretation stage, I began to video tape both my initial research conversation with managers and a second conversation in which we watched our first video taped conversation and discussed how we created meaning between us. While recognizing that much of the meaning of our conversation may be lost in the moment, this approach offers a way of making strange what is familiar, the taken-for-granted aspects in our discursive practices (Chia 1996). It also provides a means of embracing both forms of analysis: first, a way of capturing the poetic aspects of language and exploring how managers may use these forms of talk to (consciously and unselfconsciously) create organizational discourse, and second to provide a reflexive awareness of how the manager/myself constructed meaning between us and how this influenced my discursive interpretation. I will also offer examples of how I tried to incorporate a radically reflexive stance in writing up these research experiences.

The Meta-Politics of Corporate Vision Statements

John T. Luhman & David M. Boje

New Mexico State University

Each year large amounts of resources are spent by corporations to create "vision statements" that hopefully provide direction for the future and guidance of internal social relations. Vision takes proper timing and implies an understanding of context and historical connotations. "Kairos" is an ancient Greek word that means the "right" or "opportune" moment. "In archery, it refers to an opening, or an ‘opportunity,’ or more precisely, a long tunnel-like aperture through which the archer’s arrow has to pass" (E. White, 1987, p. 13). A successful vision statement requires kairos, in that it must reflect accurately, and with enough communicative power, the organization’s ability to capture market opportunities. There is a critical time when it is opportune to change, and re-story, organizational visions. Corporations, like archers, must sense that time and leave one vision by opening a passage way to another.

The question of interest for the organizational scholar might be how does the global capitalist organization discuss the future of market opportunities and their internal social relations? How does its kairos operate in its discourse on vision? A question of that manner requires the use of narrative analysis. We intend to utilize Karl Mannheim's (1936) "meta- political" typology, suggested by Hayden White (1973) in his narrative analysis of historiography. This type of narrative analysis is one of three utilized by White, the other two being the study of plot structure and the study of formal argument. Our contribution is not simply to make the political positions of vision statements salient, rather, to move toward a narrative of ideals in the envisionment of social orders by leaders of global corporations.

Mannheim’s work is based on the study of "utopias," ideas that transcend an existing order or status quo (that of a "topia") but also serve to "burst the bonds" of that existing order. A narrative of ideals is an understanding of how groups utilize these utopian mentalities (wish images) to realize a new social order. Meta-political positions do not represent political parties. They represent different conceptions of the desirability of changes in the status quo and the directions these changes should go, and different orientations toward ideal times (past, present or future).

There are four meta-political positions in Mannheim’s typology: Conservatism, Liberalism, Radicalism, and Anarchism. All four also have different time orientations for their wish-images of a social order — their utopia. Conservatives view the best form of society as the one which presently prevails. This is the best that humans can hope for or aspire to. Liberals imagine a time in the future when things will improve but it is the remote future and radical change is discouraged. Radicals view their utopian order as imminent, which inspires efforts toward revolutionary change to bring about a new social order. Finally, Anarchists idealize the remote past of a time of human innocence before the fall into any social order. This is essentially an utopia on a non-temporal plane — viewing it as a possibility of human achievement at any time — if people would only "seize control of their essential humanity, either by an act of will or by an act of consciousness which destroys the socially provided belief in the legitimacy of the current social establishment" (H. White, 1973, p. 25).

To demonstrate our argument we propose to select a sample of vision statements from the public relations materials of global corporations upon which we will conduct this narrative analysis. We propose to utilize Mannheim's typology to explore the discourse of vision statements. Further, we propose to determine each typology’s implications through a brief deconstructive analysis.

Organizational Memory and Narrative Authority

Eric Kramer

The University of Oklahoma

In this paper I will be exploring the relationship between narrative and organizational memory. I am interested in developing a scheme with which to study organizations as ongoing discursive constructs whereby the past and future are continually negotiated. I am interested in the discursive and rhetorical attempt to maintain an organizational identity over time while also embracing change. Organizational memory often takes the form of narrative which is presented as authoritative. The hermeneutic circle works as a continual churning of fed back stories of the past presented as justifications for present conditions. However, the validity of such stories is often in dispute. Therefore, as they are recounted, they become central to current discussions, especially if they are disputed. Thus, "history" is ever-present as a current topic in narrative form and disputation. Like all histories, organizational memory is often a discursive space where competing versions struggle for control of the future course of the organization. This is so because mere facts, even if a consensus is reached, are used as justifications for the present and for future courses of action. In short, narrative, even when it is "factually correct," is a fundamental political element within organizations. Facts are confused with justifications, which has the unsavory consequence of determinism, which in turn, can be used to preempt further discussion, closing off horizons for greater potential.

Theming in the Years:

An Intertextual Study of Narrative Organizational Research

from 1985 to 1999

David Barry & Brigid Carroll

University of Auckland

A "new time" platform can be seen in the gradual migration of narrative studies into the domain of organization studies. Many scholars (i.e. Calás & Smircich, 1999) refer to this as the narrative turn in organizational studies. The timing is evidentially "right" and "opportune" for this migration. Rather than viewing this new time platform as a linear act with a beginning and an end, we present "the spectacle as a cyclical rise to heights and fall to depths recurring eternally" (Schacht, 1975, p. 13). Narrative has the ability to simultaneously raise and position different points of view (e.g. differing interpretations, causalities, predictions, histories, etc.), a property that Jerome Bruner (1986) argues is lacking within paradigmatic or logico deductive research approaches. Here we embrace this attribute by creating an intertextual anthology based on organizational narrativity studies over a 15 year period. Definitionally, anthologies are viewed as a collection of multiple frames of interpretation, as against the single authority of a review. Anthologies attempt to map out the contours of a field, celebrate its achievements, and allow readings of boundaries or limits. They should operate not as a historical summary, but as a gathering, an introduction, a door, or in other words, a beginning or new time.

Our study has three stages. We start by tracing the movement of narrative within the larger circle of organizational research. This is partly a response to the interdisciplinary nature of narrative studies which makes the relationship of narrative theory and epistemology to organizational research highly complex (O’Connor, 1998). In tracing the intertextual nature of narrative, we make use of the Social Citations Index. We ask: What conversations have these studies contributed to? Initiated? Questioned? What conversations have these works not been welcomed into? What shifts are evident?

We then focus on the patterning of themes evident in narrative organizational research. In turn, each of our own stories about narrative organizational research has its own dramatistic elements (characters, settings, event structure, etc.), and yet each talks to the others as well. In our accounts we touch on several themes: voice (e.g. gendered voices, cracking voices, empassioned voices, subdued voices); crisis (e.g. of the known, of confidence); transparency (e.g. moves between levels of textual awareness); and identity (e.g. struggles between coherence and contradiction, discord and order).

We conclude by bringing these stories together to form a new time platform, a stage of considerations from which future narrative studies might be cast, and performed.

Given the postmodern turn, the ascendancy of complexity theory, and the forces of globalization which refer to "space-time" compression, it is useful to explore the ways that we conceptualize and experience time in organizational life. In this paper we will explore how earlier theorists have contrasted analytic view of time with concrete experience of time; we will connect these ideas to Paul Ricouer’s sense of time and narrative. To illustrate these concepts we will discuss jazz improvisation as an arena in which agents rely on this narrative view of time to innovate and coordinate action within a group context. Finally, we will explore implications of this view of time for organizational innovation as well as research.

This is a theme that concerned the French philosopher Henri Bergson at the turn of the century. He noticed that way we conceive of time is something analytical and detached. In fact, we tend to conceive of time in spatial metaphors. We talk about filling up time; we arrange to "meet at 8:00" as if time were a location we will arrive at. Bergson contrasted this with the concrete experience of time. Time is something experienced as immediate and fluid. It is a flowing surge in which past, present, and future flow together in a kind of progressive evolution. The past as something detached and distant is a fiction that is one consequence of thinking about time in spatial terms. This view of time as an immanent unfolding cannot be grasped with cognitive concepts, but can only be inuitively grasped. The term he coined was "duree," and connotes an immediate, undifferentiated accumulation that connects past present and future.

Similarly, in his study of the relationship between narrative and time, Ricoeur (1984, citing Augustine) explained how memory (past), attention (present) and expectation (future) produce the threefold present of our experience (the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future). To make his point, Ricoeur (1984:20) quoted from Augustine's Confessions:

Suppose that I am going to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin my faculty of expectation is engaged by the whole of it. But once I have begun, as much of the psalm as I have removed from the province of expectation and relegated to the past now engages my memory, and the scope of the action which I am performing is divided between the two faculties of memory and expectation, the one looking back to the part which I have already recited, the other looking forward to the part which I have still to recite. But my faculty of attention is present all the while, and through it passes what was the future in the process of becoming the past. As the process continues, the province of memory is extended in proportion as that of expectation is reduced, until the whole of my expectation is absorbed. This happens when I have finished my recitation and it has all passed into the province of memory.

According to Ricoeur, Augustine interpreted the recitation of a psalm against the backdrop of passing time -- seeing different parts of the psalm in shifting relationship to past (memory), present (attention) and future (expectation). Using Augustine’s words, Ricoeur pointed to one of the key features of any narrative (a psalm being only one example), namely, that every narrative has a beginning, a middle and an end, a characteristic which inextricably links narrative to time.

Riceour and Augustine both associated this experience of time past in time present (and through expectation projected into time future) to Augustine’s belief that human beings have the capacity to experience distensio anami – a state of consciousness that expands beyond ordinary awareness, a state that, according to Augustine, involves stretching the soul to embrace the expanse of time contained in the threefold present. As Ricoeur explained it, Augustine was arguing phenomenologically using the example of psalm reading that "the extension of time is a distension of the soul." This is because the impression that is left as a memory (or the expectation that leaves an equal trace) stretches the soul beyond (or within) the present moment.

Based on our previous work (Hatch 1998; Barrett, 1998) we will explore the example of jazz improvisation and connect it to this narrative concept of time. First we will discuss how jazz musicians experience these intuitive glimpses of duree, how jazz improvisation goes beyond the view of time as rational units with spatial differentiation. We will discuss how musicians synchronistically connect the past, present, and the future as they improvise and how their experience of time is transforming as well as transformative. For example, as Augustine showed in relation to psalm recitation, the musicians’ memories continuously expand as they play a tune. This involves not only remembering the head, but remembering what each of the musicians plays as the tune develops.

Second, we will extend Bergson’s image of duree and elan vital and Augustine’s soul stretching beyond the temporal to the social sphere, exploring how a group of musicians can coordinate action with little or no future blueprint. We will develop and explore the concepts of repetition and referencing within improvisation, how socially coordinated improvisation depends upon collective memory and instantaneous glimpses of possible futures that continually trigger intuitive glimpses of the present.

Finally, we will draw implications for organizational behavior, including the following areas: implications for collective memory; the creation and transformation of technical knowledge; mechanisms for tacit coordination when action cannot be planned in advance.

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