Blurry Vision & Stormy Weather: Rhythmic And Impromptu Interweaving of Temporalities in Communication

Envisioning and working toward the future are prominent practices in organizations. However, they often carry a primarily rational orientation, as if the future could be predicted and enacted exclusively through planning and forecasting. Recent efforts in organizational research problematize this conceptualization. Rather than conceptualizing past, present, and future as distinct and linearly unfolding, we increasingly understand temporalities as co-present and partly out of our control. In this latter thinking, the future emerges as a continuously changing product of how temporalities intersect; of how the ‘here-and-now’ connects to various ‘there-and-then’ situations. Yet, so far, we lack a good understanding of how these intersections or relations are accomplished. Mobilizing Simpson et al.’s (2020) conceptualization of temporalities as epistemic resources, this paper explores how past, present, and future situations are interwoven through the temporal lines that reside between them. We study an engineering firm operating in the offshore wind industry pursuing the vision of a greener future characterized by long-term caretaking of assets. Drawing on abductive reasoning, our findings reveal rhythmic and impromptu practices to illustrate how temporalities become interwoven in communication. Our insights add to temporality and organizational communication research, demonstrating how various temporal interweavings shape organizational development toward an envisioned future. Keywords: temporalities, communicative constitution, epistemic resources, interaction, rhythms