A Study Of Pluritemporal Structuring In Hospital Radio Presenting Practices

Abstract

Building on a social constructionist view of time, this thesis develops an understanding of how organizational members produce and reproduce temporal structuring through practices. Temporal structuring is a process in which temporal rules and resources are used in patterns of practice. In organizations temporality is often constructed as “clock time”. However, in their everyday practice, organizational members organize their work around multiple temporalities. Even though organizations often foreground discourse about “clock time”, this masks the diverse ways in which organizational members talk about and practically use time. In response, this thesis proposes a practice-based approach to acknowledge how multiple coexisting temporalities are constructed through configurations of practitioners, objects and spaces that bridge different communities within organizations. This process is labelled pluritemporal structuring. After three preliminary studies with temporary organizations, I conducted the main empirical study of this thesis at a hospital radio station in the South of the UK. The data was collected through shadowing radio shows, collecting visual artifacts, and semi-structured interviews with radio presenters. The findings suggested that four practices were temporally structured within radio shows: Organizing Copresenters, Organizing Listeners, Organizing Features, and Organizing Backtiming to the News. Each of these practices was temporally structured through a combination of two dimensions relating to sociomaterial arrangements and different types of relational knowing. Furthermore, at a higher level of analysis, the research suggested that during a radio show the four practices temporally structured each other. These findings illustrate the significance of sociomaterial arrangements to how practitioners perform pluritemporal structuring during a finite amount of clock time.In conclusion, this thesis makes a theoretical contribution through a practice-based understanding of the coexistence and interdependences of temporal structuring patterns in pluritemporal organizations. This thesis also contributes methodologically by illustrating the use of a sociomaterial approach to the study of organizational temporalities. This thesis finally contributes towards a theoretical and empirical understanding of temporary organizations.

Date of Award	25 Jun 2016
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Svenja Tams (Supervisor) & Russ Vince (Supervisor)