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Urgency at work: Trains, time and technology
,
Gillian Symon
New Technology, Work and Employment, Volume: 38, Issue: 3, Pages: 453 - 471
Swansea University Author:
Katrina Pritchard
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DOI (Published version): 10.1111/ntwe.12269
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 wi...
| Published in: | New Technology, Work and Employment |
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| ISSN: | 0268-1072 1468-005X |
| Published: |
Wiley
2023
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| Online Access: |
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa63033 |
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| 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 railway 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 workers, 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. |
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| Keywords: |
Narrative, railway workers, smartphone, sociomateriality, time, urgency |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Funders: |
British Academy |
| Issue: |
3 |
| Start Page: |
453 |
| End Page: |
471 |