Time and Temporality of Change Processes

Theories of organizational change tend to consider episodic and continuous change to be ontologically incompatible. We discuss how their assumed incompatibility stems from different conceptions of time. The main contribution of this chapter is to demonstrate how, by taking an event-based view, the two types of change may be integrated with one another. Continuous change takes place in the present as events in the making, whereas episodic change is marked by events in the past or as projected upon the future. This endogenous view of time as events “from within” enables the ontological gap between episodic and continuous change to be bridged. It enables us to understand how actors evoke previous episodic changes or project future episodic changes while pursuing continuous change in the on-going present. Also, in this view, continuous and episodic change become seen as two intertwined dimensions of interplay along what we call an immanent temporal trajectory.