How time works at distance. The temporal structures of remote working in the Covid-19 era

The debate on the two different facets of time, clock and event time, intertwined with organizational life has increasingly gained traction in the organization literature. Yet, what happened to temporal structures embedded in organizations, due to the organizational shock caused by Covid 19, is still unknown. This conceptual paper offers a preliminary discussion of whether time in organization is affected by the massive worldwide migration to remote working and particularly sheds light of how clock time has been changing in the last months. Since, research argue that most changes will last in the post-pandemic, the analysis would help to look beyond the emergency of the pandemic. Through the lens of the Zerubavel’s four major dimension of the temporal profile of any situation, I discuss how each dimension has been affected, in the last year, and the potential implications for the future of objective and subjective time in the “new normal”.