Temporality in Medical Work: Time also Matters

Critical Analysis

In this text, the authors explore the nature of time in a hospital setting. An analysis of ethnographic data indicates that medical professionals engage with time, rather than experience time, and engage with it through three features: temporal trajectories, temporal rhythms, and temporal horizons. These three features make up the primary contribution of this article: a framework for evaluating and understanding the temporal qualities of work.

Time is largely considered to be objective, and located outside of people—it is something that pushes forward, and is endured. However, “it is critical to recognize that the experience of time also has a social component.” The way we experience time gives it meaning, and that meaning is largely influenced by social and cultural patterns. In a work context, people leverage (or are influenced by) strategies of temporality that help them work effectively; citing Orlikowski and Yates, the authors perceive that “people experience time through temporal structures that they reify through recurrent use in their everyday practices.”

In the context of a hospital, three primary temporal features emerge. These are trajectories, rhythms, and horizons.

A temporal trajectory is a structured timeline of things that happen, and have happened. There is a “temporal logic” by which events in a workplace unfold, and that logic highlights and emphasizes key activities and patterns, and how those relate to one-another.

A temporal rhythm is the way activities repeat and overlap, and they are “knitted together to create a collective whole.” These are reoccurring patterns, which are themselves knowledge.

A temporal horizon indicates how people respond to the rhythms of time—it is an activation of a set of rhythms, that is used to organize and work. A horizon is associated with a person, not an activity, and can be flexible or inflexible, and close or distant.

In combination, characterizing work through these three lenses shows how people anticipate their work and the consequences of their work as related to time: they “lead to expectations about the future based on past events.” These patterns are used to predict events and negotiate needs. The trajectories indicate the timeline of expected events; the rhythms describe the patterns that occur and reoccur; and the horizons become resources of specific combinations of trajectories or rhythms.

Research Value

The value of this work in informing my own research is that it:

• Provides a working framework for thinking about time in the context of work
• Indicates the challenges a newcomer will have related to time, as they are unaware of any of the three qualities presented
• Provides specific time-based qualities that can be taught and learned