Unthinking images of time in organizations: ‘The shopping centre keeps time with a rubato waltz’
基于英国购物中心的民族志调查，批判组织研究对时间的固化隐喻，提出时间问题本质上是美学问题，需通过概念纠缠来理解。
Drawing on a recent ethnographic enquiry, this article reports on a series of encounters with organization at a British shopping centre that can shed light on the ways in which time is understood by organizational scholars. This article argues that research on time has a tendency to reproduce certain images and metaphors which indicate an unquestioned set of metaphysical assumptions about the nature of time that dictate how it can be understood. These habits of thinking time render organization studies unable to conceptualize or adequately describe the encounters that characterize ethnography as a mode of research inquiry. As such, following in the tradition of Gilles Deleuze, this article advances the idea of a ‘conceptual entanglement’ and suggests thereby that the problem of time is an aesthetic one which is part of a complex and almost ineffable series of sensoria and connections; describable only by saying that the shopping centre keeps time with a rubato waltz. This work of unthinking time will be presented as a part of an account of ethnography as the tracing and parsing of the entanglements of many different concepts and field encounters.