Urgency at work: Trains, time and technology

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• Author: Katrina Pritchard,Gillian Symon
• Date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12269

Received: 21 July 2021

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Accepted: 23 March 2023

DOI: 10.1111/ntwe.12269

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Urgency at work: Trains, time and technology

Katrina Pritchard

1

|Gillian Symon

2

1

School of Management, Swansea

University, Swansea, UK

2

Royal Holloway, University of London,

Egham, UK

Correspondence

Katrina Pritchard, School of

Management,Swansea University,

Swansea, UK.

Email: k.l.pritchard@swansea.ac.uk

Funding information

British Academy

Abstract

In contemporary workplaces, urgency is symbolic of

workers' experience of time as accelerated, and

often associated with use of digital technologies. Yet

we know little about how urgency is constructed at

work, including the agentic roles of technology and

other materialities. Based on interviews with rail-

way workers, we extend Rosa's conceptualisation of

temporal junctures to explain how urgency as a

temporal framing is sociomaterially constituted,

sustained and challenged across and between

workers and their managers, particularly through

smartphone‐use. Our analysis extends existing

thinking on temporality at work by demonstrating

how urgency narratives at sociomaterially complex

configurations of temporal junctures shield work-

ers, managers and the organisation against the

temporal fragility of the rail infrastructure, such

that each narration of urgency carries forward an

illusion of temporal control.

KEYWORDS

narrative, railway workers, smartphone, sociomateriality, time,

urgency

New Technol Work Employ. 2023;38:453–471. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ntwe

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This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits

use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or

adaptations are made.

© 2023 The Authors. New Technology, Work and Employment published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

Time has generally been viewed ‘as a measurable and sequential commodity’(Bailey

& Madden, 2017; 5) in both workplace studies and in everyday work itself. However, research

has questioned this taken‐for‐granted nature of temporality (Shipp & Jansen, 2021) and argued

for more complex considerations (Feldman et al., 2020; Lehdonvirta, 2018; Orlikowski

& Yates, 2002). These calls have led to the theorisation of cultural temporal frameworks

(Hernes & Schultz, 2020; Rosa, 2017). From this theorisation, sociologists have proposed that

workplace temporalities echo (and reinforce) related cultural temporal frameworks of the

increased acceleration (Rosa, 2013), busyness (Wajcman, 2015) and immediacy (Kaun, 2015)of

our contemporary, digital lives. We argue this broad conceptualisation needs further

development and aim, in this paper, to capture how temporality is locally constructed in

specific work activities. We focus on urgency as this is a temporality that reflects contemporary

concerns with acceleration (Rosa, 2018), but is also situated in the local processes of

prioritisation at work (Olson, 2015). We examine how UK railway workers construct, sustain

and challenge a local temporal framing of urgency.

In pursuing this aim, we focus on Rosa's (2013,2017,2018) conceptualisation of temporal

junctures, as temporal interfaces across and within social, work and other systems. When these

temporal interfaces are misaligned (e.g., one system is moving slower than the other) we get

temporal desynchronisation (Rosa, 2017). In workplaces, these interfaces then need negotiation

to reprioritise activity so that work can continue: as in ‘stop what you are doing, this is urgent’.

The means of negotiating and reprioritising work includes the widespread use of digital

technologies. Digital technologies are held to open possibilities for resynchronisation because

they appear to speed up processes that need to be realigned at temporal junctures. However,

they also increase expectations that such possibilities are speedily fulfilled and, as a result, we

experience time as being squeezed (Rosa, 2017). Studies have yet to explore the role of such

technologies in producing situated workplace temporalities (Thulin & Vilhelmson, 2022).

Adopting a sociomaterial lens, a further aim therefore is to understand how the entanglement

of workers and technologies is implicated in local workplace temporalities.

Additionally, studies of contemporary mobile technologies have mainly focused on

management and office‐based professionals rather than operational staff. However, Rosa

(2017) argues that it is likely that employees ‘have very little time sovereignty’while managers

may have more authority over workplace ‘time budgets’(p. 30). Our study of railway workers

enables us to explore a range of roles from hands‐on engineers to senior managers, set within a

materially complex and temporally fragile (Ramakrishnan et al., 2021) environment in which

the local urgent temporal framing is a constant challenge. An additional aim then is to consider

role relationships, the tensions arising from these (Knights & Yakhlef, 2005) and how these are

implicated in negotiating work as urgent.

We firstly discuss recent sociological theorising on temporality, how this informed our

research and how our localised application of this wider theorising seeks to develop our

understanding of urgency. We then outline sociomateriality as an important conceptualisation

of human‐material relations and how, through this study, we seek to integrate sociomateriality

into an account of workplace temporality. We describe in detail the workplace context of our

case organisation, Railway Engineering (RE, a pseudonym), and work activities within this,

together with our narrative methodology and analysis strategy. Findings are presented in

relation to how urgency is narrated; in other words how it is sociomaterially constituted,

sustained and challenged. The findings demonstrate how urgency narratives at sociomaterially

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