The paper begins with an examination of three conventional views of time in the context of social problems interventions: time as history; time as effort; and time as duration.  When we consider time as history or occasion we are concerned about whether or not “it’s the right time for this.”  Program success or failure is explained and funding decisions are made on the basis of whether a community is “ready” for a particular kind of program.  Time is treated as effort when a program designer, funder, or implementer acknowledges that change is labor intensive, that a certain number of person hours will be necessary to get the job done.  Finally, time is taken into account as duration when we take into account the fact that change is not instantaneous, that “this will take time.”

While each of these considerations of time constitute a distinctive advance in how we think about social interventions, all three are caught up in a relatively non-structural “time as quantitative resource” view of the world.  When time is seen as duration we want to acquire more calendar time for an intervention to be effective.  When time is seen as effort we want more dollars to hire more outreach workers to put in the person-hours necessary to change the world.  And when time is seen as history or occasion, we want a higher degree of match between theoretical conditions and empirical conditions of change.
In our field work, we observed numerous distinctly temporal phenomena that could not be adequately understood in terms of shortages of time in any of these senses.  The funder provided ample funds for hiring staff, the project was funded for seven years, and much thought and investigation was invested in ensuring that recipient communities were “ready” to undertake and benefit from the program.  Both social scientific and “person on the street” explanations of these temporal problems tended to be expressed in terms of individual or community pathology.  Specific scoundrels were seen to have derailed the process and ongoing political squabbles were offered as the reason schedules could not be kept to, deadlines met, etc.  The inability of community members to find time to sit down and work together was explained by the fact that too much was already going on in the community (but not succeeding in improving conditions much) or the unwillingness of “them” to make the time to meet with “us.”  Behind all of these explanations was the idea that time was something that if there were more of it, things would function much better.

I propose here a perspective that focuses on the socio-temporal structure of communities as an alternative explanation for some of the time challenges faced by community interventions like this one.  My model begins from the premise that communities are, for the purpose of thinking about community level interventions, not communities of people but communities of organizations.  Organizations, the dominant actors in communities of organizations, are, in general not the nice, neat, atomistic integrated social actor implied by a name on a membership roster, and a community of organizations does not consist of a homogeneous, fully connected, collectivity of common fate.  Instead, organizations have “garbage can” characteristics and communities are highly incomplete networks of loosely coupled entities.

Organizations, problems, issues, and solutions all have “natural” periodicities, cycles times, life cycles, and schedules, temporal attributes I collectively call their “calendars.”  When entities become linked together in either intentional or de facto coalitions and collaborations, these “calendars” move through networks giving rise to a number of temporo-structural problems.  These include schedule gridlock (when satisfactory meeting times cannot be found), the diffusion of calendar noise (when deadlines, emergencies and other temporal crises ripple through networks), temporal normal accidents (when unforeseen tight couplings between calendars causes system failures), the unbureaucratization of planning (when inclusion wreaks havoc with project schedules), the inadvertent emergence of time as a moral symbol (when meeting times indicate who matters more and who less), and the emergence of patterns temporal impossibility (when cycle times, response times, and program durations interact to guarantee no effects).

Having elaborated on these socio-temporal structural phenomena  I conclude by examining the some of the underlying social structural characteristics of communities of organizations as objects and arenas of intervention – garbage cans, loose coupling, and structural holes – that give rise to these temporal effects and the implications they have for coalitional and collaborative solutions to urban social and health problems.

* Originally presented at SSSP Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, August 1999.