Forthcoming in
Sociological Perspectives
(Full Text PDF)
Dan Ryan
danryan at mills dot edu
ABSTRACT
Based
on a qualitative case study of a
multi-year, multi-city attempt to forge community coalitions against
substance
abuse, the article analyzes three categories of organizational
temporalities –
cycles, event streams, and temporal style.
Community initiatives based on collaboration, coalitions, and
cooperation, projects that “bring everyone to the table,” provide an
opportunity
for naturalistic observation of the unanticipated, but analyzable,
effects that
emerge when mismatched organizational temporalities interact. This article lays out a theory of these
emergent effects of interorganizational time conflicts in communities
of
organizations. The aim is not to argue
for the primacy of temporal effects over other dimensions to include
them in a
multi-dimensional view of the causes of problems encountered in
multi-organization community initiatives.