Temporal co-ordination and time tensions in a university business school: The non-academic staff's account
Brandon E. Brown, Oxford Brookes University
Reva Berman Brown, Oxford Brookes University
St. Augustine: "What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know: but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not." (Watts, 1912, p. 239)
The university business school is a swan. It glides smoothly on the water of higher education, purposeful and rational. And underneath, supporting the academic body is the non-academic support system, paddling furiously and invisibly in order to keep the body afloat.
The relationship between academics and non-academics ranges from hostility through acceptance to appreciation. Much research into higher education tends to concentrate on the academic body – the academics themselves and their work, issues of teaching, research and curriculum, knowledge, and patterns of pedagogic practice, all of which are all so obviously based in time that this is taken for granted. The paper concentrates on the non-academics of the Central Business School (CBS), attached to a university in the central midlands of the UK, and the ways in which the staff structures and co-ordinates time, and deals with the tensions inherent in their jobs. (They are called here by the clumsy term 'non-academics', because the people consulted are not just the managers, administrative or clerical support staff, but also the other, invisible members of the Central Business School's community – the porters, caretakers, gardeners, security staff, cleaners, catering staff, and general maintenance and repair staff).
Human history can be thought of as a struggle to take control of the environment. From the early beginnings of this struggle, from a temporal perspective, people have been task-orientated, and their lives and tasks have been tuned to the natural cycles and rhythms of the world around them.
With the advent of machines and a more industrially-based society, people have been able to break away from the restrictions inherent in their environment. For instance, with the invention of artificial light, work need no longer start at sunrise and stop at sunset. As people found themselves able to change their environment, they also found that not only could they also control time, but that they also had to use time in a different way to govern the new processes they had developed. As manufacturing became more complicated, rigid schedules were necessary to control the process. As a result, the western conception of time has evolved from a cyclic time, governed by the natural events in the environment, to a more artificial, linear time, governed by our invented time-keepers - clocks, chronometers, and calendars.
Hassard (1989, p. 6) says 'Work organisation came to depend increasingly upon the highly rationalized and structured orders of formal and quantitative time'. As a result, education (for a working life) has taken on many of the temporal rigidities found in the organisational world. And currently, all higher education depends on an ignored cadre of non-academic support. It is their perception of their activities which are the focus of the paper.
The first section of the paper considers the broader picture of time tension, temporal structuring and the institutional culture of higher education. The next sections discusses the temporal structuring of the university business school under study. The following section provides the research site, a business school in a university in the south-east of England named the Central Business School for the purposes of the paper, and the research design is detailed. The findings are provided in terms of the two guiding concepts of the research – kairos and chronos – and in the final sections, the threads of the argument are drawn together in terms of the temporal co-ordination activities undertaken by the university business school during the business school year.
References
Hassard, John. (1989) ‘Time and Industrial Sociology’, in Paul Blyton, John Hassard, Stephen Hill and Ken Starkey (eds.) Time, Work and Organization. London: Routledge.
Watts, William. (1912) St. Augustine’s Confessions - Book XI. London: Heinemann.