The
Management Department & The Research Center
-
MOS WORKSHOP -
Ioana Lupu
will present her
paper
Tuesday, April
9th 2019
Room N231 – 9:15 a.m.
in Cergy
3:15
p.m. in Singapore
Theme: Optimal
Busyness.
Temporality of Control and Control of Temporality in Professional Service Firms
Abstract: How
do
professionals experience and cope with sustained busyness? This paper explores
how and why individuals who regularly work long hours are drawn to prefer and
maintain busyness even during quieter periods. This is puzzling in the light of
current work-life balance studies which emphasize individuals’ desire to strike
a balance between work and private life. Drawing on 146 interviews and more
than 300 weekly diaries from two professional service firms, we advance prior
research on temporality and organizational control. We do this by theorizing
the temporality of controls, which we define as the ability of controls to
craft busyness as an attractive and desirable temporal experience. We show how
in response to controls individuals respond by attempting to control
temporality through time manipulation and body instrumentalization
in order to create optimal busyness, a state characterized by a balance between
perceived controls and autonomy, where individuals feel in control of
temporality
