Temporality in business networks: The role of narratives and management technologies

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper addresses the nature of temporality in business networks. Approaches to temporality generally employ a dualistic approach: time can be understood as social and natural, tensed and untensed, subjective and objective, kairos or chronos, agency and structure. We examine these two approaches and suggest that the problem for situated actors is how to cope with and negotiate with these dualities. This is particularly salient in cases of innovation, when actors attempt to bring about their particular versions of the future facing acute problems of uncertainty. The innovation literature highlights the role of narrative in helping actors to negotiate uncertainty and construct spaces for action in a world of continuous flow. The emphasis on narrative tends to obscure the role of management technologies in anchoring narratives into existing routines and procedures as well as relate these technologies to the untensed world of chronos. Management technologies help stabilise entities and relationship amongst entities in what otherwise is a chaotic world of events and flux. The issue of process and temporality has been explored in the business network literature from a variety of angles both theoretical (see e. The focus has largely been on explaining change and evolution in business networks, modelling sequences of events (e.g. as path-dependent trajectories) and deriving methodological principles to study change. In this paper, we want to take up the perspective of the situated actor to understand temporality and process. Our purpose is to examine alternative conceptions of temporality and to attempt to build a picture of change that starts with the present, the here and now, confronting an uncertain future. Our argument is that situated actors combine different notions of temporality to make sense of history and their choices through credible narratives that link past, present and future. The paper is structured as follows. In the next section we examine different approaches to temporality and process focusing on the dualities that underpin many conceptions of time. In the third section, we use innovation processes as a case to examine the role of narrative in making sense of ontological uncertainty. In the fourth section, we examine how a variety of management technologies help actors cope with the uncertainties of the future before offering some concluding comments in the final section. Our main argument is that narratives and management technologies embody alternative notions of temporality that are …