Everything you always wanted to know about time management (but didn’t have time to ask)

I’ve structured my dissertation around these three questions. What do we know about time management? Does it actually work? What, exactly, is time management? These are fundamental questions; addressing them is necessary pave the way toward a more thorough, evidence-based and, ultimately, socially useful conception of time management. The first article asks the question: What do we know about time management? To address this question, my coauthor and I reviewed the literature. We found that scholars usually assess time management’s effectiveness by its impact on performance (in school and at work) and wellbeing. However, findings were mixed—we couldn’t really tell whether time management boosts performance and enhances wellbeing. We also noticed that the time management literature was surprisingly narrow: there is a plethora of useful insights in sociology, psychology, and behavioral economics that the time management literature had almost completely overlooked. To address this issue, we integrated these insights spanning various disciplines to show how internal (e.g., individual differences) and external factors (e.g., national culture) can affect the way we manage time. Our main point is that unless researchers control for these factors, studies will keep yielding confusing results. The first article of this dissertation thus not only reviews the state of the literature but also offers novel perspectives to guide future research. The second article asks the question: Does time management actually work? To find out, we conducted a meta-analysis on the topic. In line with the first article, we found that most studies assess time management’s effectiveness by its influence on performance and wellbeing. The meta-analysis is, of course, more conclusive than the first article for three reasons. First, the meta-analysis is more comprehensive, covering more than 50,000 people over many decades. Second, the meta-analysis allows for moderation testing: we can control for factors that affect time management outcomes, such as national culture. Third, the meta-analysis, unlike our qualitative review, is quantitative: we can determine not just whether time management works, but also, and importantly, to what extent. By and large, time management works. It has a moderate impact on performance (both in professional and academic settings) and an even stronger impact on wellbeing (especially life satisfaction). The findings of this meta-analysis also challenge our intuitive ideas of what time management is and what it does. We elaborate on this last point in the third article. The third article asks the question: What is time management? One may point out that this question should have been addressed at the very beginning of the dissertation. That is a valid point. However, figuring out first what we know about time management (and whether it works) has led me to an interesting conclusion: the literature has a very narrow, ahistorical, Anglo understanding of time management. Only in drawing from sociology, history, psychology, philosophy, economics, and gender studies, at the very least, can we get a fuller picture of time management. Thus, defining time management only at the end of this dissertation makes sense: I needed to first review the literature, figure out what was missing, and take the time to draw from other disciplines to acquire a broader understanding. Only after doing all this was I able to develop a definition of time management that, I think, applies not only in modern North American settings, but also in a wide variety of cultures and historical periods. The third article, of course, goes way beyond just defining time management. This theory paper uses cultural evolution principles to describe how time management, as an idea, evolves in different settings. Just like genes, time management can survive or die out depending on the surrounding environment. The main advantage of this theory is that it goes beyond the one-size-fits-all approach to time management that many scholars have used until now. There is no one best way to manage time. Rather, people use time management strategies that more or less fit their environment—maladaptive strategies perish; adaptive ones prevail. Overall, the appeal of this paper is not so much that it addresses the question of time management is as the question of what time management is for

Remembrance of things past: How employees perceive their company’s history

Over the past few decades, organizations have been increasingly showcasing and narrating their history (Keulen, 2013). A testament to this trend are the growing number of corporate museums and the increasing popularity of corporate archivists such as The History Factory (Delahaye, Booth, Clark, Procter, & Rowlinson, 2009; Fogerty, 1997; Nissley & Casey, 2002). The phenomenon hasn’t gone unnoticed in academia, as many scholars have looked into the concept of rhetorical history—the practice of narrating organizational history in a self-serving way —and put forward several hypotheses relating to the effects of rhetorical history on strategic change and organizational culture (Gioia, Corley, & Fabbri, 2002; Ooi, 2002; Suddaby, Foster, & Trank, 2010). I contend that engaging in rhetorical history can be understood as an act of impression management, that is, rhetorical history is the process of managing the historical image of an organization to appeal to relevant audiences (e.g., customers, employees). But for corporate history to be effective, the audience must value and give credence to that history; in order to know whether this is the case, I conducted an exploratory study on how 29 employees from two medium-sized organizations experience corporate history in their daily lives. As well, I inquired into related issues such as how corporate history is assembled and how it circulates within the organization. The results offer, among other things, a detailed description of the attitudes employees hold toward their organization’s history. I conclude with an overview of this study’s theoretical and practical implications

The Governance of Corporate Responses to Climate Change: An International Comparison

In response to pressures from governments, investors, non-governmental organisations and other stakeholders, many large corporations have adopted a variety of carbon and energy management practices, taken action to reduce their emissions and set targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Using the case of international retailers, this article examines whether, and under what conditions, non-state actors might be capable of assuming the governance roles that have historically been played by national governments. This article concludes that external governance pressures can, if they are aligned, robust and of sufficient duration, have a significant influence on internal governance processes and on corporate strategies and actions. However, the specific actions that are taken by companies – in particular those that require significant capital investments – are constrained by the ‘business case’. That is, companies will generally only invest capital in situations when there is a clear financial case (i.e. where the benefits outweigh the costs, when the rate of return meets or exceeds company targets) for action. That is, the extent to which external governance pressures can force companies to take action, in particular challenging or transformative actions that go beyond the boundaries of the business case, is not at all clear. This is particularly the case if the business case weakens, or if the opportunities for incremental change are exhausted. In that context, the power of non-state actors to force them to consider radical changes in their business processes and their use of energy therefore seems to be very limited