From synchronizing to sustaining: Coordinating across divergent temporal structures in collaborations of agile and non-agile units
Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Coordination among interdependent actors is facilitated by shared temporal structures, yet actors often operate with divergent temporal structures. Such divergences create coordination challenges, conflicts, and inefficiencies, necessitating the need to understand how actors can coordinate across temporal differences. Research has identified two approaches: synchronizing practices, which aim to (re-)create shared temporal structures, and sustaining practices, which preserve differences in temporal structures while enabling coordination. Prior research has largely focused on synchronizing but overlooked its costs and negative consequences as well as the agentic role of non-time-setting actors in decision-making. Research on sustaining practices is still in its infancy, with only a few sustaining practices uncovered that prove effective only in the specific contexts in which they have been identified. Moreover, the complementarity and the dynamics between these approaches remain largely unexplored. This dissertation addresses these gaps by investigating how actors with divergent temporal structures coordinate their interdependent activities. The empirical context comprises eight case studies of collaborations between agile and non-agile units in banking and insurance organizations, a context that provides both substantial temporal differences and strong interdependencies that necessitate coordination. It draws on data from 91 interviews, 256 participatory observations, and 642 pages of archival documents. The findings advance understanding in three ways. First, they reveal previously underexplored drawbacks of synchronizing practices, highlighting how actors deliberately choose to engage in or resist synchronization. Second, they extend sustaining practices by uncovering buffering and harmonizing practices. Third, they highlight the dynamic nature of temporal structuring, showing how actors continuously integrate synchronizing and sustaining practices to effectively coordinate over time. Overall, this dissertation contributes to temporality research by advancing and integrating the so far fragmented bodies of research on synchronizing and sustaining practices. It also contributes to research on agile practices. The study demonstrates that combining synchronizing and sustaining practices over time allows actors to achieve durable coordination across temporal boundaries.
Author: Müller, Carolin
Institution: University of Cologne
Language: English
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7119562514