Representing time: the humble timesheet as a representation and some details of its completion and use

This paper is an attempt to bridge theoretical and empirical accounts of the practice of representation. For the practice of ‘representation’, while prevalent in, and fundamental to, the organisation of the social world, has been described almost exclusively in abstract terms in the social sciences. There has been little discussion of the concrete practices which actually take place when representations are made or used. In this paper it is these practices which I would like to take as my starting point, by looking at the creation and use of a particular representation, discussing some observations on its constitution and use. The representation which will be discussed was a timesheet system, used by staff who worked in a large British Oil company. This system was used by staff to account for their time working on different projects by completing paper timesheets. During the time of the study, the system was computerised, highlighting some interesting issues about its composition and in turn its role as a representation. As an object of study timesheets are, of course, fairly mundane. Anyone who has had to complete a timesheet would know that these neglected little forms can hardly be described with great excitement. Yet the practices around this system had considerable significance for those concerned. In particular, the timesheet system enabled the company studied to collaborate with other organisations in the expensive job of oil exploration and extraction. The timesheets were then used to exchange money between the different collaborating organisations, depending on who had done what in which organisation. This exchange of money, however, depended upon the timesheets being seen as accurate. As this paper will show, this accuracy relied on the work of the accountants, who ran the system, to accomplish the timesheet system as a representation. That is, the work of the accountants to have the timesheets be seen as a valid account, for the purposes at hand, of the organisation’s activities. In this way a very specific set of practices around a somewhat mundane artefact caused something ‘bigger’ to happen in the sense of large oil companies collaborating. Yet, if we follow the individuals involved we find that they never disappear; their practices never – as such – become ‘macro’, but rather the effects of their actions have larger scope than those actions themselves. In the discussion I will suggest that Latour’s ‘chain of transformation’ provides an illuminating way of looking at this practice, and in particular the ways in which ‘macro’ actions appear in a description of ‘micro’ actions like this.