Special Issue of Strategic Organization “Temporal Work: The Strategic Organization of Time”

Time, in its various dimensions and manifestations (speed, rhythm, sequence, horizon) is inherent to strategic management (Mosakowski and Earley, 2000). The very notion of strategy implies projecting organizations into the future through decisions in the present while building on the past. Performance and competitive advantage are believed to depend on speed of decision making and execution (Baum and Wally, 2003; Eisenhardt, 1989; Dykes et al., 2018), and on capturing windows of opportunity by entering markets at the “right” time (Hawk et al., 2013; Suarez and Lanzolla, 2007) and sequencing decisions correctly (Pettus et al., 2018). Tensions and tradeoffs between the short term and long term are inherent to key strategic decisions about innovation and sustainability (Crilly, 2017; Flammer and Bansal, 2017; Laverty, 1996; Slawinski and Bansal, 2015). Moreover, scholars have shown the strategic importance of temporal fit or “entrainment” (Ancona and Chong, 1996) between environmental and organizational rhythms (Hopp and Greene, 2018; Khavul et al., 2010; Shi and Prescott, 2012).