Time and temporality in organisations: The case of Eskom

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes analysing organisations as temporal phenomena composed of multiple temporalities. We argue that the likelihood that an organisation is well placed to function instrumentally with regard to its formal mandate is when what we will call ‘operational time’ is dominant in the temporal regime. We propose that organisations perform poorly when other temporalities come to dominate the temporal regime and/or when the temporal regime is chronically disrupted. We apply this framework to a study of Eskom, the state power company in South Africa. In Eskom, for example, we show how operational time was displaced by a political temporality that ultimately destabilised the temporal regime of the organisation as a whole.

KEYWORDS:

• Organisational performance
• temporality
• governance
• Big Data
• predicting performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 A similar critique can be made of the business strategy literature. Michael Porter’s field defining study of Competitive Strategy (1980), hardly focuses on the capacity of businesses to implement the strategy selected. Analysis is directed to the company environment, what Porter defined as the ‘industry’ in which the company operated (Porter, 3). He later defended this focus and warned critics that emphasised internal company dynamics over strategy of ‘becoming inward looking’ (Ibid, xvi). Peter Drucker’s famous retort ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’, even if apocryphal, served to shift the emphasis away from the external environment and back on to the role and competency of managers (see Drucker, 2001). The attention on managers, however, often obscures that organisational strength/ weakness has diverse origins in the entity and that what is needed.

2 The term ‘governance’ owes its recent use from UN, World Bank and IMF documents from the 1990s, seeking to stress the importance of non-government agents in the role of governing. For the etymology of the term see the short discussion document prepared for the European Union (Hunh Quan Suu).

3 Brian Levy et al. nuance this further by suggesting that bureaucratic organisation is a condition of intentionality in government, though it often needs to be supplemented by horizontal initiatives to be generate results (Levy et al., 2016).

4 These are some of the problems with the ‘assessment’ tools developed by various international bodies like the United Nations and the World Bank and/or various governments (see Cox, Jolly, Van Der Staaij & Van Stolk, 2018).

5 Strangely, Naidoo thinks it unlikely that organisational changes were driven by the politics of patronage (23), though he speculated that they formed part of efforts to manage a political coalition, that is, served patronage purposes.