Things Take Their Times: Coordinating Individual and Material Eigenzeiten in Creative Work

Description

Things take their time, especially in creative work. Yet, creative work faces temporal complexity that requires ongoing temporal coordination. While the role of entrainment of creative work to pacers such as regulatory procedures and conference or trade fair cycles is already well understood, creative projects are also affected by temporalities emanating from the participating individuals and from materials used. These temporalities elude, at least in part, the direct influence of actors, and hence pose an additional challenge for temporally coordinating creative work. To further understand these resistant ‘intrinsic’ temporalities of individuals and materials, we make productive use of Nowotny’s concept of Eigenzeit, which translates as ‘own time’ of people or things. Based on a comparative ethnography of two materially and socially rich creative settings, a pharmaceutical research lab and a music studio, we find two forms of dealing with Eigenzeiten in creative projects: entraining project schedules to Eigenzeiten and manipulating Eigenzeiten to accelerate or decelerate creative work processes. We argue that the concept of Eigenzeit enriches current debates on temporality and creative work, since it foregrounds temporal dynamics that have hardly received systematic attention in research on temporal coordination in general and entrainment in particular.

Period	14 Mar 2025
Event title	49. Workshop der Wissenschaftlichen Kommission Organisation (WK ORG) im Verband der Hochschullehrerinnen und Hochschullehrer für Betriebswirtschaft (VHB) e.V.
Event type	Conference