City Research Online

Abstract

Time is central to how professional work in organizations is priced, organized, and evaluated. Despite this centrality, how temporal meanings are formed and what shapes their construction within organizations remains less understood. This thesis thus explores how professionals construct temporal meanings in high-performance professional organizations.

To do so, it examines the system of billable hours – where time is tracked in six-minute increments and assigned explicit value – across three City law firms characterized by continuously demanding temporal expectations, performance pressure, and intensity. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 80 professionals from trainee to senior partner level, the analysis examines – across three empirical chapters – how professionals interpret and enact expectations around temporal commitment, how such meanings are constructed and reinforced through hierarchical working relationships, and how one firm manages temporal uncertainty without relying on prediction and time-based metrics. A distinctive feature of the data is its relational structure – junior/mid-level and senior professionals were selected to provide two-sided accounts of relational dynamics in stable working relationships.

The research reveals that relationships crucially shape temporal meanings in professional work. Even when organizations uniformly measure and control time, professionals construct markedly varied meanings through relational dynamics with senior professionals in their immediate environment. A particularly revelatory case further shows that when time is removed from organizing and valuing work altogether, professionals construct value through relationships instead – revealing temporal parameters as an overlay on fundamentally relational processes of meaning construction. Temporal meanings are thus mediated through and expressions of relational dynamics rather than arising directly from organizational systems or individual differences.

These findings make three core contributions: to research on temporality in organizations by suggesting temporal orientations and structures as inherently relational; to research on ideal worker images by revealing them as plural and fragmented rather than singular and uniform; and to research on overwork by foregrounding the relational level as a crucial mediating analytical level. Additionally, this thesis opens a conversation about managing temporal uncertainty through relationships, identifying the decoupling of time and value as a novel mechanism for managing irreducible unpredictability, and relationship focus as its enabler and an alternative organizing principle to time.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management H Social Sciences > HM Sociology K Law > K Law (General)
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Bayes Business School Doctoral Theses Bayes Business School > Faculty of Management Doctoral Theses

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