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Time, Temporality, and History in
Process Organization Studies
 PE RS PECT IVES O N PRO CESS OR GANIZATION
ST UD IES
Series Editors: Ann Langley and Haridimos Tsoukas
Perspectives on Process Organization Studies is an annual series, linked to the
International Symposium on Process Organization Studies, and is dedicated to the
development of an understanding of organizations and organizing at large as
processes in the making. This series brings together contributions from leading
scholars, which focus on seeing dynamically evolving activities, interactions,
and events as important aspects of organized action, rather than static
structures and fixed templates.

Volume 1: Process, Sensemaking, and Organizing

Editors: Tor Hernes and Sally Maitlis
Volume 2: Constructing Identity in and around Organizations
Editors: Majken Schultz, Steve Maguire, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
Volume 3: How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organization
Studies
Editors: Paul R. Carlile, Davide Nicolini, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
Volume 4: Language and Communication at Work: Discourse,
Narrativity, and Organizing
Editors: François Cooren, Eero Vaara, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
Volume 5: The Emergence of Novelty in Organizations
Editors: Raghu Garud, Barbara Simpson, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
Volume 6: Organizational Routines: How They Are Created,
Maintained, and Changed
Editors: Jennifer Howard-Grenville, Claus Rerup, Ann Langley, and Haridimos
Tsoukas
Volume 7: Skillful Performance: Enacting Capabilities, Knowledge, Competence,
and Expertise in Organizations
Editors: Jörgen Sandberg, Linda Rouleau, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
Volume 8: Dualities, Dialectics, and Paradoxes in Organizational Life
Editors: Moshe Farjoun, Wendy Smith, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
Volume 9: Institutions and Organizations: A Process View
Editors: Trish Reay, Tammar B. Zilber, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
Volume 10: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
Editors: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
Time, Temporality, and
History in Process
Organization Studies
Edited by
Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby,
Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas

1
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List of Figures and Tables

Figures
1.1. Core constructs in historical organizational studies 11
5.1. Progression of the structure of events through actual events 60
7.1. Example of a page planner from Local News101
7.2. Illustration of the flowline metaphor used in an airport analogy 106
8.1. Quality assurance at Alpha 124
8.2. The development of the quality routine at Alpha 129
8.3. Temporality shaping routine patterning 131
13.1. Analytical codes and categories 246
13.2. A framework of organizational memory work 247

Tables
5.1. Some core concepts of the events-based approach 58
7.1. Overview of the action research engagement and key organizational events 95
7.2. Deadline production vs. flowline production 105
8.1. Data structure 123
12.1. Objective structures of the field before and after privatization 227
13.1. Industry and financial characteristics of sample firms 244
14.1. Examples of historical metanarratives 269
List of Contributors
François Bastien is an Assistant Professor at
the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business,
University of Victoria. His research interests
include organizational theory, identity, and
culture. His objective is to better understand
the complexity of identity within First
Nations organizations in Canada and all
over the world.
William Blattner is Professor of Philosophy
at Georgetown University in Washington,
DC, USA. He is the author of Heidegger’s
Temporal Idealism (Cambridge, 1999) and
Heidegger’s “Being and Time”: A Reader’s
Guide (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2006).
Diane Ella Németh Bongers is Associate
Professor at Universtity Paris Nanterre as
well as a coach for student entrepreneurship.
Her research is oriented towards organiza-
tions having a citizen-centered vision of
business, and has a focus on philosophy,
practice, and processes.
Isabelle Bouty is Professor of Organizational
and Strategic Management at the University
Paris Dauphine PSL, in Paris. Her research
explores the relationships between the
individual, collective, and organizational levels
in organizational and strategic processes
within processual and practice approaches.
Her research has been published in journals
such as Academy of Management Journal,
Organization Studies, Human Relations,
M@n@gement, and Management Learning.
Lena E. Bygballe is an Associate Professor
and Head of Centre for the Construction
Industry at the Department of Strategy and
Entrepreneurship at BI Norwegian Business
School. Her research interests lie within
themes related to innovation processes and
inter-organizational relationships, particularly
using the construction industry as an
empirical setting.
Arne Lindseth Bygdås received his PhD in
Strategy and Management from NTNU (the
Norwegian University of Science and
Technology), and is currently employed as
senior researcher at the Work Research
Institute at OsloMet (Oslo Metropolitan
University). His research interests include
knowing and learning in organizations,
organizational creativity and innovation,
practice-based research, and or­gan­iza­tion­al
becoming.
Diego M. Coraiola is Assistant Professor at
the University of Alberta, Augustana
Campus. His research focuses on strategy
and change. He is particularly interested in
the role of symbolic resources in the
creation, perpetuation, and transformation
of organizations, markets, and institutions.
His work has been published in contributed
volumes and journals such as Strategic
Management Journal, Journal of Business
Ethics, Business History, and Management
Learning.
Stephanie Decker is Professor in
Organisation Studies and History at Bristol
University. After completing her PhD in
history at the University of Liverpool in
2006, she held postdoctoral appointments at
the London School of Economics and
Harvard Business School. Since then she has
held academic posts at the University of
Liverpool and Aston Business School.
William M. Foster is a Professor of
Management at the Augustana Campus of
the University of Alberta. His primary
x List of Contributors
research interests include rhetorical history,
social memory studies, service learning, and
business ethics. His work has been published
in books and in journals such as Journal of
Management, Journal of Management
Inquiry, Business History and Journal of
Business Ethics. He is the Editor of Academy
of Management Learning and Education and
serves on the Editorial Review Boards of
Organization Studies, Academy of
Management Review, and Business History.
Aina Landsverk Hagen received a PhD in
social anthropology from the University of
Oslo for her work on collaborative creativity
among architects in Oslo and New York. Her
MA was based on fieldwork in Teheran, Iran,
researching feminists, freedom of speech, and
youth agency. She worked in several media
outlets as a desk journalist and copy editor,
before moving on to become a researcher,
currently at the Work Research Institute,
OsloMet (Oslo Metropolitan University). Her
work on innovation in media organizations
focuses on topics like creativity, idea
development, and audience engagement.
John Hassard is Professor of Organizational
Analysis at the Alliance Manchester Business
School. Previously he was Head of the
Management School at Keele University,
Visiting Fellow in Management Learning at
Cambridge University, and a Postdoctoral
Fellow at London Business School. His
research interests lie in organization theory,
industrial sociology, and management history.
Tor Hernes is Professor of Organization
Theory and Director of the Centre for
Organizational Time at the Department of
Organization, Copenhagen Business School,
and Adjunct Professor at USN Business
School, University of South-Eastern Norway.
In recent years, he has devoted increasing
attention to the subject of organization and
time. The main thrust of his work on time is
directed towards a situated, events-based
view inspired by Alfred North Whitehead’s
philosophy, which serves as a point of
departure for better understanding how
actors enact their time on an on-going basis.
The focus on time construction derives from
a desire to better understand how actors’
time construction may take different shapes
and accommodate variations of near and
distant pasts and futures. Tor has published
more than a dozen books, among them A
Process Theory of Organization which won
the George R. Terry Book Award at the
Academy of Management meeting in 2015.
Anthony Hussenot is a Professor in
Organization Studies at Université Côte
d’Azur, France. He specializes in new ways of
working. In his research, he explores current
developments in the way we work, focusing
on the relationship between these new
work practices and organizational
dynamics. He has conducted studies on
various topics such as the digital nomad
trend, the maker movement, the banking
sector, and education. His research has
been published in various academic
journals and edited books. One of his most
recent publications includes a book about
the maker movement and the events-based
approach (in French).
Astrid Jensen (PhD Copenhagen Business
School) is Associate Professor of
Organizational Communication at the
Department of Language and
Communication, and Director of the Centre
for Organizational Practice and
Communication (OPC), University of
Southern Denmark. Her research interests
include various aspects of organizational
communication. Recent work combines
theories of metaphor and narratives with a
practice-based perspective on organizational
change, culture, and identity. Projects on
which she is currently working include
counternarratives in and around organiza-
tions, metaphor and narratives in mergers,
strategizing, and identity construction. She

has published in international journals such
as Organization Studies, English for Specific
Purposes, Bulletin Suisse de Linguistique
Appliquee, Culture and Organization, and
Qualitative Research in Organizations and
Management.
Henrik Koll received his PhD from SDU
(University of Southern Denmark),
Department of Language and
Communication, for his work on change
management and the strategic organization of
time in a Scandinavian telecommunications
company. His research interests include the
strategic organization of time, organizational
change, temporal work in organizations,
Bourdieu’s theory of practice, strategy-as-
practice, organizational memory, and
organizational identities. Before becoming a
researcher, he worked in management
consulting, specializing in change manage-
ment. He is currently employed as a postdoc-
toral researcher at Malmö University, Sweden.
Ann Langley is Professor of Management at
HEC Montréal, Canada, and Canada
Research Chair in Strategic Management in
Pluralistic Settings. Her research focuses on
strategic change, leadership, innovation, and
the use of management tools in complex
organizations, with an emphasis on proces-
sual research approaches. She has published
over fifty articles and two books, most
recently Strategy as Practice: Research
Directions and Resources with Gerry Johnson,
Leif Melin, and Richard Whittington
(Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Philippe Lorino is Emeritus Distinguished
Professor at ESSEC Business School. He
advises the French Nuclear Safety Authority
about organizational factors of risk. He
served as a senior civil servant in the French
government and as a director in the finance
department of an international manufacturing
company. He draws from pragmatist
philosophy (Peirce, Dewey, Mead) and
dialogism theory (Bakhtin) to study
List of Contributors xi
organizations as organizing processes rather
than organizational structures. Inspired by
the pragmatist concept of inquiry, he views
organizing as actors’ ongoing dialogical
exploration of and experimentation with the
possible futures of their collective coopera-
tive action. He has published book chapters,
articles in international top-ranking
journals, and the book Pragmatism and
Organization Studies (Oxford University
Press, 2018; EGOS Book Award, 2019).
David Musson is an Associate Fellow of the
Said Business School, Oxford. He was
formerly the Business and Management
Editor at Oxford University Press.
Juliane Reinecke is Professor of International
Management and Sustainability at King’s
Business School, King’s College London. She
is a Fellow at the Cambridge Institute for
Sustainability Leadership and Research Fellow
at the Judge Business School, University of
Cambridge, from where she received her PhD.
Her research interests include process
perspectives on global governance, sustain-
ability, practice adaptation, and temporality in
organizations and in global value chains. Her
work has been published in the Academy of
Management Journal, Journal of Management
Studies, Organization Science, Organization
Studies, and Research Policy, among others.
Juliane serves as Associate Editor of
Organization Theory and Business Ethics
Quarterly and on the editorial boards of
Organization, Organization Studies and the
Journal of Management Studies.
Michael Rowlinson is Professor of
Management and Organizational History at
the University of Exeter. Before joining
Exeter he worked at Queen Mary University,
London. He previously edited the journal
Management and Organizational History
before becoming a Senior Editor for the
journal Organization Studies. He is a former
editor of the Association of Business
Schools’ Academic Journal Quality Guide.
xii List of Contributors
Gudrun Rudningen holds an MA in Visual
Anthropology from Goldsmiths College,
University of London, and works at the
Work Research Institute at OsloMet (Oslo
Metropolitan University). Her research has
mainly revolved around creativity, material
culture, digital technology, and organiza-
tional change. She is currently conducting
her PhD in Social Anthropology at the
University of Oslo, on the digital transform­
ation of the newspaper industry.
Barbara Simpson is Professor of Leadership
and Organisational Dynamics at Strathclyde
Business School and Distinguished Professor
of Learning and Philosophy at Aalborg
University. Originally trained as a physicist,
she brings the principles of action, flow, and
movement to bear on the social processes of
creativity, innovation, leadership, and change.
Her current thinking is also deeply informed
by the philosophies of the American
Pragmatists, especially George Herbert Mead’s
integration of sociality and temporality.
Andrew David Allan Smith is a Senior
Lecturer in International Business at the
University of Liverpool Management
School. He is a historical organization
studies scholar whose research deals with
the relationship between cultural evolution
and how firms create and exploit competi-
tive advantage. He has published in
journals including the Journal of
Management Studies, Journal of Business
Ethics, Enterprise and Society, Business
History, Political Studies Review, and
Multinational Business Review. Andrew
completed his PhD at the University of
Western Ontario in 2005 and his BA at
Queen’s University Belfast in 1999.
Roy Suddaby is the Winspear Chair of
Management at the Peter B. Gustavson
School of Business in Victoria, Canada, and
a Chair in Organisation Theory at the
Management School of the University of
Liverpool, UK. He is the past Editor of the
Academy of Management Review. His
research has won best paper awards from the
Academy of Management Journal and
Administrative Science Quarterly, and he has
twice been recognized by Thompson Reuters
as ranking in the top 1 percent of researchers
in business and economics for citation
impact. His research focuses on the critical
role of symbolic resources—legitimacy,
authenticity, identity, and history—in
improving an organization’s competitive
position. His current research examines the
changing social and symbolic role of the
modern corporation.
Anna R. Swärd is a Senior Lecturer at
the Department of Strategy and
Entrepreneurship at BI Norwegian Business
School. She received her PhD in 2013 and
has since focused on research within the
field of strategy, in terms of understanding
the processes of coordination, cooperation,
trust, and practice within and between
organizations.
Ingrid M. Tolstad is a social anthropologist
and senior researcher at the Work Research
Institute, OsloMet (Oslo Metropolitan
University). Based on fieldwork among
hipsters in Williamsburg, New York, her MA
presents an analytical model for the notion
of coolness, while her PhD in musicology
from the University of Oslo is an ethno-
graphic case study of a Swedish music
production company in the making. She
mainly researches creativity, innovation,
digitalization, and the development of
organizations within the fields of media, art,
and culture, having a keen interest in the
methodological potential and implications
of citizen participation in research.
Rory Tracey is a doctoral graduate of the
Department of Work, Employment and
Organisation at the University of
Strathclyde. His research focuses on
technology and its role in the emergence of
novelty in organizations. Specifically, he is

interested in the nature of technique, and
how design-led practices provide a structure
for the generation of new forms.
Haridimos Tsoukas (www.htsoukas.com)
holds the Columbia Ship Management Chair
in Strategic Management at the University of
Cyprus, and is a Professor of Organization
Studies at Warwick Business School,
University of Warwick, UK. He has
published widely in several leading academic
journals, including the Academy of
Management Review, Strategic Management
Journal, Organization Studies, Organization
Science, Journal of Management Studies, and
Human Relations. He was the Editor-in-
Chief of Organization Studies from 2003 to
2008. His research interests include:
knowledge-based perspectives on organiza-
tions; organizational becoming; the
management of organizational change and
social reforms; the epistemology of practice;
and epistemological issues in organization
theory. He is the editor (with Christian
Knudsen) of The Oxford Handbook of
Organization Theory: Meta-theoretical
Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2003).
He has also edited (with N. Mylonopoulos)
Organizations as Knowledge Systems
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and (with
J. Shepherd) Managing the Future: Foresight
in the Knowledge Economy (Blackwell, 2004).
He is also the author of the book If Aristotle
were a CEO (in Greek, Kastaniotis, 2004).
Anne Live Vaagaasar is an Associate
Professor at the Department of Leadership
and Organization, and Head of the Project
Management Executive Portfolio. Her
research interests lie within themes related to
project management and leadership,
knowledge development and integration,
innovation processes, and inter-organizational
relationships.
Frithjof E. Wegener is a PhD candidate in
the Department of Design, Organization,
and Strategy at the Faculty of Industrial
List of Contributors xiii
Design Engineering of the Delft University
of Technology. His research approach is
inspired by pragmatism and engaged
scholarship, combining practice and process
theory for researching between practice and
theory. The topics of his research combine
his backgrounds in organization studies and
design studies to study organizations,
design, strategy, innovation, and organiza-
tional designing. Alongside his PhD, he
discusses management and organization
classics as a host of the Talking about
Organizations Podcast.
Alia Weston is Associate Professor of
Creative and Business Enterprise at OCAD
University, Toronto. She has expertise in
business management and design, and her
research is focused on understanding how
creativity and business can contribute to
positive social change. Key themes in her
research include exploring creative resist-
ance in resource-constrained environments,
and how alternative business practices can
contribute to solving key challenges in
society.
Elden Wiebe (PhD, University of Alberta) is
Associate Professor of Management, Leder
School of Business at The King’s University,
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. His primary
research interests are time/temporality in
relation to organizations, organizational
change, and strategic management, and
spirituality in the workplace. He has
published in Perspectives in Process
Organization Studies, Organization, Journal
of Business Ethics, Journal of Management
Inquiry, Management and Organizational
History, Journal of Religion and Business
Ethics, and Healthcare Quarterly. He is
co-editor (with Albert J. Mills and Gabrielle
Durepos) of the Sage Encyclopedia of Case
Study Research.
Eviatar Zerubavel is Board of Governors
Distinguished Professor of Sociology at
Rutgers University, New Jersey. His main
xiv List of Contributors
areas of interest are cognitive sociology and
the sociology of time. His recent publica-
tions include The Elephant in the Room:
Silence and Denial in Everyday Life (Oxford
University Press, 2006); Ancestors and
Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and
Community (Oxford University Press,
2011); Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social
Structure of Irrelevance (Oxford University
Press, 2015); and Taken for Granted: The
Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable
(Princeton University Press, 2018). He is
currently working on a book on formal
theorizing. In 2003 he was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2016 he
received the Rutgers University Faculty
Scholar-Teacher Award, and in 2017 he
received the Society for the Study of
Symbolic Interaction’s Helena Lopata
Mentor Excellence Award.
Series Editorial Structure

Editors-in-Chief
Ann Langley, HEC Montréal, Canada, ann.langley@hec.ca
Haridimos Tsoukas, University of Cyprus, Cyprus and University of Warwick, UK, process.
symposium@gmail.com

Advisory Board
Hamid Bouchikhi, ESSEC Business School, France
Michel Callon, CSI-Ecole des Mines de Paris, France
Robert Chia, University of Strathclyde, UK
Todd Chiles, University of Missouri, USA
François Cooren, Université de Montréal, Canada
Barbara Czarniawska, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Martha Feldman, University of California, Irvine, USA
Raghu Garud, Pennsylvania State University, USA
Silvia Gherardi, University of Trento, Italy
Cynthia Hardy, University of Melbourne, Australia
Robin Holt, University of Liverpool, UK
Paula Jarzabkowski, Aston Business School, UK
Sally Maitlis, University of British Columbia, Canada
Wanda Orlikowski, MIT, USA
Brian T. Pentland, Michigan State University, USA
Marshall Scott Poole, University of Illinois, USA
Georg Schreyögg, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Barbara Simpson, University of Strathclyde, UK
Kathleen Sutcliffe, University of Michigan, USA
Andew Van de Ven, University of Minnesota, USA
Karl E. Weick, University of Michigan, USA

Editorial Officer and Process Organization Studies Symposium Administrator

Sophia Tzagaraki, process.symposium@gmail.com
Endorsements

“As we become more willing to convert reified entities into differentiated streams,
the resulting images of process have become more viable and more elusive.
Organization becomes organizing, being becomes becoming, construction becomes
constructing. But as we see ourselves saying more words that end in ‘ing,’ what must
we be thinking? That is not always clear. But now, under the experienced guidance of
editors Langley and Tsoukas, there is an annual forum that moves us toward con­
tinu­ity and consolidation in process studies. This book series promises to be a vigor-
ous, thoughtful forum dedicated to improvements in the substance and craft of
process articulation.”
Karl E. Weick, Rensis Likert Distinguished University Professor
of Organizational Behavior and Psychology, University of Michigan, USA
“In recent years process and practice approaches to organizational topics have
increased significantly. These approaches have made significant contributions to
already existing fields of study, such as strategy, routines, knowledge management,
and technology adoption, and these contributions have brought increasing attention
to the approaches. Yet because the contributions are embedded in a variety of differ-
ent fields of study, discussions about the similarities and differences in the applica-
tion of the approaches, the research challenges they present, and the potential they
pose for examining taken for granted ontological assumptions are limited. This
series will provide an opportunity for bringing together contributions across differ-
ent areas so that comparisons can be made and can also provide a space for discus-
sions across fields. Professors Langley and Tsoukas are leaders in the development
and use of process approaches. Under their editorship, the series will attract the
work and attention of a wide array of distinguished organizational scholars.”
Martha S. Feldman, Johnson Chair for Civic Governance and Public
Management, Professor of Social Ecology, Political Science,
Business and Sociology, University of California, Irvine, USA
“Perspectives on Process Organization Studies will be the definitive annual volume of
theories and research that advance our understanding of process questions dealing
with how things emerge, grow, develop, and terminate over time. I applaud
Professors Ann Langley and Haridimos Tsoukas for launching this important book
series, and encourage colleagues to submit their process research and subscribe to
PROS.”
Andrew H. Van de Ven, Vernon H. Heath Professor
of Organizational Innovation and Change, University of Minnesota, USA
xviii Endorsements

“The new series—Perspectives on Process Organization Studies—is a timely and

valuable addition to the organization studies literature. The ascendancy of process
perspectives in recent years has signified an important departure from traditional
perspectives on organizations that have tended to privilege either self-standing
events or discrete entities. In contrast, by emphasizing emergent activities and recur-
sive relations, process perspectives take seriously the ongoing production of or­gan­
iza­tion­al realities. Such a performative view of organizations is particularly salient
today, given the increasingly complex, dispersed, dynamic, entangled, and mobile
nature of current organizational phenomena. Such phenomena are not easily
accounted for in traditional approaches that are premised on stability, separation,
and substances. Process perspectives on organizations thus promise to offer power-
ful and critical analytical insights into the unprecedented and novel experiences of
contemporary organizing.”
Wanda J. Orlikowski, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Information Technologies and
Organization Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
“The recent decades witnessed conspicuous changes in organization theory: a slow
but inexorable shift from the focus on structures to the focus on processes. The
whirlwinds of the global economy made it clear that everything flows, even if change
itself can become stable. While the interest in processes of organizing is not new, it is
now acquiring a distinct presence, as more and more voices join in. A forum is
therefore needed where such voices can speak to one another, and to the interested
readers. The series Perspectives on Process Organization Studies will provide an excel-
lent forum of that kind, both for those for whom a processual perspective is a matter
of ontology, and those who see it as an epistemological choice.”
Barbara Czarniawska, Professor of Management Studies,
School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden
“We are living in an era of unprecedented change; one that is characterized by
instability, volatility, and dramatic transformations. It is a world in which the
seemingly improbable, the unanticipated, and the downright catastrophic appear to
occur with alarming regularity. Such a world calls for a new kind of thinking: think-
ing that issues from the chaotic, fluxing immediacy of lived experiences; thinking
that resists or overflows our familiar categories of thought; and thinking that accepts
and embraces messiness, contradictions, and change as the sine qua non of the
human condition. Thinking in these genuinely processual terms means that the
starting point of our inquiry is not so much about the being of entities such as
‘organization’, but their constant and perpetual becoming. I very much welcome this
long overdue scholarly effort at exploring and examining the fundamental issue of
process and its implications for organization studies. Hari Tsoukas and Ann Langley
are to be congratulated on taking this very important initiative in bringing the
process agenda into the systematic study of the phenomenon of organization. It
promises to be a path-breaking contribution to our analysis of organization.”
Robert Chia, Professor of Management, University of Strathclyde, UK
 Endorsements xix

“This new series fits the need for a good annual text devoted to process studies.
Organization theory has long required a volume specifically devoted to process
research that can address process ontology, methodology, research design, and analysis.
While many authors collect longitudinal data, there are still insufficient methodo-
logical tools and techniques to deal with the nature of that data. Essentially, there is
still a lack of frameworks and methods to deal with good processual data or to
develop process-based insights. This series will provide an important resource for all
branches of organization, management, and strategy theory. The editors of the series,
Professors Ann Langley and Hari Tsoukas are excellent and very credible scholars
within the process field. They will attract top authors to the series and ensure that
each paper presents a high quality and insightful resource for process scholars. I
expect that this series will become a staple in libraries, PhD studies, and journal edi-
tors’ and process scholars’ bookshelves.”
Paula Jarzabkowski, Professor of Strategic Management,
Aston Business School, UK
1
Time, Temporality, and History in
Process Organization Studies
An Introduction
Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley,
and Haridimos Tsoukas

Time and history have emerged as prominent subjects of interest in organization

studies. Until recently, both time and history have been treated implicitly in most
social science research—as important aspects of context, but never important
enough to incorporate explicitly into theory. Time has always been an assumptive
element of causality in processes of social change, yet “most social and behavioral
scientists pay little attention to the temporal factors involved in their research” (Kelly
and McGrath, 1988: 10). History, similarly, is a critical element in accounts of social
change, yet contemporary sociology has, typically, relegated history to the dimin­
ished status of “background context” in explanatory accounts (Alford, 1998).
Today, however, both time and history have begun to occupy prominent positions
in contemporary studies of organizations. Management scholars openly ac­know­
ledge a “historic turn” in organizational research (Clark and Rowlinson, 2004; Mills,
Suddaby, Foster, and Durepos, 2016) as well as a turn towards temporality (Reinecke
and Ansari, 2015; Slawinski and Bansal, 2015; Granqvist and Gustafsson, 2016).
Leading management journals are replete with special issues encouraging more
research on temporality and history. This volume and the conference from which it
derives stand testament to the recent foregrounding of time and history as focal
objects of organizational study.
Scholarship in process organization studies (Langley, 1999; Tsoukas and
Chia, 2002) has played a pivotal role in raising awareness of the importance of
time and history in understanding organizational change. While many definitions
of process theory exist (Van de Ven, 1992), its core ontology is to consider “how
and why things—people, organizations, strategies, environments—change, act
and evolve over time” (Langley, 2007: 271). Since “[no] concept of motion is pos­
sible without the category of time” (Sorokin and Merton, 1937: 615), time and
history are foundational concepts that underpin our understanding of processes.

Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization
Studies: An Introduction In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy
Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley,
and Haridimos Tsoukas.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0001
2 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies

For instance, understanding a process as ever becoming highlights its temporal

trajectory—the “patterning of events that stretches back into time and extends
into the future”—and the work of actors in continually reconstructing such a
­trajectory (Hernes, 2017: 603).
Despite the growing interest in temporality and history, their precise relationship
to processes of change remains woefully under-theorized. While there are emergent
strands of theory—i.e. rhetorical history (Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank, 2010;
Suddaby, Coraiola, Harvey, and Foster, 2019) and organizational temporality
(Fine, 1990; Hassard, 2001; Hernes, 2014)—these strands have yet to coalesce into a
paradigmatic statement of either disciplinary identity or theoretical significance for
organizational scholarship. Both subjects lack what Kuhn (1967) would describe as a
defining “puzzle” or anomaly in how we understand organizational change or
“becoming” (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). Relatedly, we lack a coherent set of concep­
tual tools that can be applied to ongoing research directed to addressing the puzzle.
Collectively, the chapters in this volume devoted to understanding temporality
and history as a central element of process offer a glimpse of both a defining puzzle
and a set of emergent conceptual tools that might be useful for scholars engaged in
historical and temporally sensitive organizational research. Before elaborating their
contribution to the emergent theoretical scaffolding of historical and temporal
organizational scholarship, we first present the puzzle and its evolution in prior
literature.

1.1 The Puzzle: Questioning Objectivity and

Agency in Process Studies of Time and History
The central puzzle shared by most chapters in this volume challenges the assump­
tion of time as an objective measure of processes as well as the assumption of ob­ject­
iv­ity in historical narrations of the past. In terms of temporality, scholars have often
struggled to move beyond chronological conceptions of “clock” time (Ancona,
Goodman, Lawrence, and Tushman, 2001). As a result, time is often seen as inde­
pendent from actors and activities. Actors are being driven by deadlines and they
structure their activities around seemingly objective timelines, such as the hours of
the day measured by clock time or the seeming objectivity of calendar time marking
the seasons or moments in one’s lifetime. As Hassard et al. and Simpson et al. suggest
(this volume), the traditional focus on time as a linear and objective measure of pro­
cess may well have reflected the subject of study—standardized industrial processes
and predictable bureaucratic practices. However, as scholars have started to appreci­
ate the complexity of multiple, overlapping processes in an accelerating society, these
conceptions of time seem at odds with the temporal experience of organizational
actors.
The way we conceptualize time and temporality is critical for process organization
studies since it shapes how we view and relate to organizational phenomena—as
 An Introduction 3

unfolding processes or stable objects—and how we view agency in general (Reinecke

and Ansari, 2015, 2017). In their influential paper on agency, Emirbayer and Mische
(1998: 962) place temporality at the heart of agency as they define agency as “tem­
por­al­ly embedded process of social engagement.” They focus on situating agency
“within the flow of time,” approaching agency as “informed by the past (in its habit­
ual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative
possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and
future projects within the contingencies of the moment)” (Emirbayer and
Mische, 1998: 962).
In order to further advance our understanding of temporality and agency in
organizational research, we must return to the foundational question of how we con­
ceptualize “the flow of time”. If temporality is understood as an external and ob­ject­
ive measure of process, the question is how time shapes agency—for example, how
the time horizons actors consider when contemplating past and future events influ­
ence competitive behavior (Nadkarni, Chen, and Chen, 2016). In contrast, if tem­
por­al­ity is understood as a cultural construction of socially accepted temporal norms
(Zerubavel, this volume), the question is reversed: how does agency shape concep­
tions of time? This opens up a much wider range of possibilities of how actors may
influence the sociotemporal orders they live in.
Similarly, the central puzzle shared by the chapters focused on history challenges
the assumption of objectivity in historical narrations of the past. Put more explicitly,
each raises the question “can history ever be objective?” Questioning the objectivity
of accounts of the past is not unique to historical organization studies. Historians
place this question at the center of their epistemological debates on historiography,
particularly as their discipline has been challenged by critiques from other social
scientists, most particularly from social historians. Perhaps the best articulation of
“the objectivity question” for historians was provided by Chicago social historian
Peter Novick:

The assumptions on which it [the objectivity question] rests include a commit-

ment to the reality of the past, and to truth as a correspondence to that reality; a
sharp separation between knower and known, between fact and value, and above
all between history and fiction. Historical facts are seen as prior to and independ-
ent of interpretation: the value of an interpretation is judged by how well it
accounts for the facts; if contradicted by the facts it must be abandoned. Truth is
one, not perspectival. Whatever patterns exist in history are “found” not “made”.
Though successive generations of historians might, as their perspectives shifted,
attribute different significance to events in the past, the meaning of those events
was unchanging. (Novick, 1988: 1)

As Novick’s quote demonstrates, the objectivity question is not a single question, but
rather an admixture of epistemological and ontological challenges to scientific
rationality that characterized the postmodern turn in the social sciences and
4 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies

humanities some decades ago by writers as diverse as Thomas Kuhn, Michel

Foucault, and Clifford Geertz.
An important corollary to the objectivity question, if the answer is “no,” is “what
are the limits of subjective reinterpretation of the past by interested actors?” That is,
if historical accounts of the past are interpretations subject to the myopia or outright
bias of the narrator, what are the limits to which the past can be creatively recon­
structed to serve the interests of powerful actors in the present? The “objectivity
question,” thus, arrives hand-in-hand with the “agency question.” The agency ques­
tion is also not new to historical scholarship. The subjective interests of the narrator
of history have been the subject of speculation since the time of Herodotus, but have
become increasingly prominent through powerful challenges from scholars in crit­
ic­al theory (Foucault, 1964), archeology (Veyne, 1988; Assman, 1995), sociology
(Zerubavel, 1996), and literary criticism (White, 1973), among others.
The agency question is arguably more relevant in organizational theory, inasmuch
as the organization has come to represent the ultimate form for the expression of
rationalized agency in contemporary society. The corporation is perhaps the ul­tim­
ate manifestation of modern agency, with a seemingly irrepressible capacity to sub­
ordinate all forms of human experience and expression to commercial self-interest.
A growing stream of studies, captured under the broad construct of rhetorical his­
tory, has begun to document the various ways in which managers in organizations
engage in the “strategic use of the past as a persuasive strategy to manage key stake­
holders of the firm” (Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank, 2010: 157). The growing
empirical accounts of the use of rhetorical history in organizations not only re­inforce
the validity of both the “objectivity” and “agency” questions in the context of or­gan­
iza­tions, they also strengthen the need for a coherent conceptual vocabulary through
which ongoing research can begin to address these questions.

1.2 Contributions to this Volume: Exploring Time,

Temporality, and History in Process Studies
Each of the remaining chapters in this volume explicitly or implicitly address the
objectivity and agency questions for organizations, albeit at different levels of ana­
lysis and with a focus on different concepts and phenomena. The next three chapters,
based on the PROS 2018 keynotes, provide important foundations for our under­
standing of how actors experience and may influence process, temporality, and
history.
In Chapter 2, “Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative: A Heideggerian Approach,”
William Blattner examines the phenomenological conditions of how we are able to
experience a process as unfolding in time, and how we render the process intelligible
by selecting what aspects of the past matter and the direction of where it is going. To
do so, Blattner introduces us to Edmund Husserl’s account of “retention” and “pro­
tention” to explain how we are able to experience things as changing or processes as
 An Introduction 5

unfolding. By “retaining” the prior elements of experience and “protaining” or

anticipating future elements of experience, we are able to grasp the continuing rele­
vance of a previous situation and its continuation. Blattner then draws on Heidegger’s
phenomenology of time, and in particular, the notion of “temporal aspect” to explain
how we distinguish what is relevant to the present from what is not, as well as to
anticipate the direction that a process is taking. The temporal aspect is captured by
the distinctive grammatical features of language, as in the perfect tense of “have
done,” but is also expressed in the logic of narrative frames, which move from in­aug­
ur­at­ing event toward resolution. Drawing on examples ranging from literature to
politics, Blattner uses these phenomenological insights to explain how the way we
relate to the past, and what we select as relevant to current concerns, informs our
forward-looking ambition to influence the processes we experience as unfolding.
These insights into the temporality of processes are complemented by Tor Hernes’
chapter, “Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality” (Chapter 3).
Hernes takes up the challenge to conceptualize the notion of temporality as the tem­
poral extension of the present moment. He does so by drawing on the notion of
“event” and Whitehead’s epochal theory of time to suggest that events are constitu­
tive of organizational temporality. Events can explain how the present “now” extends
into the future so that a sense of continuity is created despite the continual perishing
of time. The important point here is to understand that events are not just occur­
rences that are accomplished in any particular moment. Instead, events are defined
by their becoming an event even after the actual event has occurred, and their dur­
ation is defined by the time it takes for events to become events. The illuminating
example of how events become events is Hernes’ discussion of US President Lincoln’s
Gettysburg Address. Despite being one of the best-known speeches in US political
history, the speech was barely noticed when President Lincoln first delivered it in
1863. The Gettysburg Address only became “that” speech over a century later as its
message of progress and democracy was evoked in a range of civil rights and wom­
en’s movements. The Gettysburg speech is still becoming “the” speech each time it is
read aloud in American classrooms, keeping the event alive by translating it again
and again in light of a newly emerging present. As this example suggests, tem­por­al­
ity—the extension from the present “now”—can be understood in terms of the
becoming of events.
In Chapter 4, sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel introduces a sociocultural perspective
on temporality. In his chapter, “The Sociology of Time,” Zerubavel is concerned with
the collective experience and organization of time. This concerns social norms and
traditions of measuring, reckoning, and organizing time, or the sociotemporal order
through which social groups temporally organize their lives. Zerubavel stresses that
this sociotemporal order contrasts with the physiotemporal order. The former is
artificial and based in cultural conventions even if it is experienced as absolute and
inevitable. Hence, our collective conception of time as a finite resource, which is
reflected in common expressions such as “spending” or “saving” time, is both artifi­
cial and consequential for how social life is experienced and organized. A key insight
6 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies

of the sociology of time is its political dimension, which enables us to explore the
relation between power and time. The authority to impose or change a sociotempo­
ral order is both an expression of political power as well as a means to reinforce it. In
sum, Zerubavel’s sociocultural perspective sheds light on the tension of how time
can be experienced as objective clock time while being an artificial imposition on
people’s temporal experience.
In Chapter 5, “Studying Organization from the Perspective of the Ontology of
Temporality: Introducing the Events-Based Approach,” Anthony Hussenot, Tor
Hernes, and Isabelle Bouty address the fundamental question of the ontology of
temporality, and its implications for the study of organizations. The authors reject a
realist understanding of time as a standardized and external dimension of process.
Instead, they build on process philosophy and suggest that temporality is expressed
through events. Actors make sense of the indivisible flow of temporal experiences in
terms of distinguishable events and gain a sense of continuity by positioning them­
selves in relation to their history, the present moment, and an expected future. Not
unlike Blattner’s discussion of retention and protention—the capacity to retain the
immediate past and anticipate the immediate future—the core idea is that the pre­
sent moment is always co-defined by a sense of past, present, and future events.
From this perspective, organizing becomes the organizing of events. Such a view can
capture contemporary organizational phenomena such as project or freelance work,
where workers are simultaneously oriented toward multiple, partly interrelated pro­
jects. Here, organizing does not mean creating and enacting predictable structures
and routines but navigating these multiple projects around multiple yet overlapping
event temporalities. In sum, the event-based approach reconciles the process philo­
sophical notion of temporality as an indivisible flow or duration with people’s desire
to order their experience along a timeline with distinguishable temporal categories,
without resorting to the notion of clock time.
In Chapter 6, “The Timefulness of Creativity in an Accelerating World,” Barbara
Simpson, Rory Tracey, and Alia Weston further add to a conceptual move away from
clock time as they seek to better understand and theorize the temporal dimensions
of creativity. Their starting point is the dilemma that clock time, with its realist (or
objectivist) focus on the ordered succession of past, present, and future, seems inad­
equate as a basis for understanding the ways in which creative work is practiced and
temporally resourced. The authors contrast realist and idealist orientations to time,
and conclude that although clock time is pervasive in modern Western societies, it is
more suited for the control and prediction of recurring processes than the flexibility
and flow of creative practice. Simpson and her colleagues propose the concept of
timefulness as an alternative foundation for understanding the temporality of cre­
ative practice. Timefulness resonates with the idealist view of becoming time and
describes the temporal experience of emergence that is inherent to any creative
action. Timefulness evokes multiple temporalities as emergent resources that nur­
ture mindfulness, carefulness, and playfulness as enablers for creative action.
 An Introduction 7

Whereas Simpson et al. argue that creative work requires rethinking temporality,
Lindseth Bygdås, Aina Landsverk Hagen, Ingrid M. Tolstad, and Gudrun Rudningen
(Chapter 7) provide an empirical illustration of how this might be accomplished—
moving from deadlines and linear working to a continuous flowline. In their chapter,
“Flowline at Work: Transforming Temporalities in News Organizations through
Metaphor,” Bygdås et al. show how actors have agency in shaping the temporality of
their work, even though they might take the temporal structures of their working
lives as objective facts. Based on an ethnography of a newsroom, the study shows
how journalists navigate the temporal transformation from the deadline-oriented
production of the daily printed newspaper to a continuous cycle of online news pro­
duction and distribution. However, internalized temporal structures make it difficult
to imagine a different rhythm. In producing the printed newspaper, the journalists
had been working towards a daily deadline for the print edition, which provided a
temporal configuration for their working day. Producing and publishing news online
requires a different temporality, and challenges journalists to adapt to the tem­por­al­
ity of the 24-hour news cycle. This required a temporal reimagining of their activity.
The study explores how the introduction of a new metaphor—from deadline to
flowline—helped actors to reimagine what they were doing and to change the tem­
poral structuring of their work practices. In sum, the study shows how temporal
structures are interlinked with how news production is practiced and its meaning
defined, and vice versa.
In Chapter 8, “Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning,” Lena Bygballe, Anna
Swärd, and Anne Live Vaagaasar explore how temporality shapes the creation and
recreation of routines. Based on a process study of a quality routine in a large con­
struction company called Alpha, they demonstrate how routine patterning is a con­
tinuous flow between past, present, and future enactments of the routine. However,
temporal conflict is salient in the creation and recreation of a quality routine.
Organizational actors must negotiate multiple coexisting temporalities in or­gan­iza­
tions, such as different pace or time horizons between company headquarters and
project teams. But conflicting temporalities can also be productive in creating
changes in routine patterning so as to reconcile short-term and long-term per­form­
ance in quality work.
The notions of temporal shaping and flowlines at work suggested by the authors
of the two previous chapters take on a new meaning in Chapter 9, “Capturing the
Experience of Living Forward from within the Flow: Fusing a “Withness” Approach
and Pragmatist Inquiry” by Frithjof Wegener and Philippe Lorino. Whereas most
empirical process scholars tend to focus on time, temporality, and history from the
perspective of looking backward at the past (whether or not this past is seen as sub­
ject­ive­ly experienced), Wegener and Lorino argue for a perspective that is interested
in capturing the forward movement of life. They do so by integrating the pragmatist
ideas of Dewey and James with the “withness” thinking proposed by John Shotter
(2001). This is a creative methodological approach that builds strongly on various
8 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies

strands of process philosophy. It emphasizes living forward within the flow of

ex­peri­ence along with others to intervene in the continually shifting present. From
this perspective, researchers both share temporal experience with the subjects they
research (rather than looking back at it “objectively” from the outside) and to action
in the present, thereby “putting themselves in the making” (paraphrasing the
authors’ reference to James).
The next chapter, “Organizational Time in Historical Perspective,” by John
Hassard, Stephanie Decker, and Michael Rowlinson (Chapter 10), more explicitly
problematizes the objective understanding of time in organizations. Their core argu­
ment is that many organizational theorists and sociologists have unreflexively
adopted a “realist, structural or determinist explanation of time at the expense of
ethnographic, interpretive or process-oriented ones.” The authors argue, very much
in line with the perspectives of several other contributions mentioned above, that
time needs to be considered as a process of subjective interpretation. Hassard et al.
offer an important cautionary tale about the dangerous tendency of social scientists
to emulate the assumptions of the natural sciences. By assuming that time is linear,
monotonic, and stable, there is an implicit assumption that the object of study
ex­peri­ences acts of change in a similarly linear, monotonic, and stable process (Kelly
and McGrath, 1988). But anyone with even the slightest degree of life experience
understands that humans’ subjective experience of time is quite distinct from its
objective expression. Hassard et al., thus, expose a critical issue about the messiness
of time as a central construct in process theory, raising a foundational question for
theorists: how might we integrate objective and subjective aspects of time in process
theory?
In Chapter 11, “Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool,” Diane Ella
Németh Bongers extends the paradox of the subjective experience of time in two
dimensions. First, she focuses on history rather than time as the key dimension to be
analyzed. Second, she accentuates the contrast between objective and subjective
expressions of history by analyzing differences in the narration of the history of an
organization in a formal, collective, and institutional way (termed “tight history”)
and the narration of history in an informal, individual, and self-expressive way
(termed “loose history”). Based on the study of a French cooperative, Bongers con­
cludes that the skillful blending of objective (collective) and subjective (individual)
rhetorical histories and the embedding of individual memories in collective or­gan­
iza­tion­al processes and routines contributed to the rapid growth and success of this
new form of cooperative organizing, which has grown rapidly to become one of the
largest worker cooperatives in Europe. While Bongers’ analysis reinforces the prob­
lematization of objective and subjective experiences of the past, her study usefully
points to a fascinating possibility that traditional tensions common to most or­gan­
iza­tions may be resolved by strategically integrating the tensions between objective
and subjective accounts of the past.
Bongers’ core insight regarding the organizational advantages of bridging ob­ject­
ive and subjective history is reinforced by Henrik Koll and Astrid Jensen’s
 An Introduction 9

ethnographic study of historical practices inside a Scandinavian telecom, twenty-five

years post-privatization (Chapter 12). Their chapter, “Appropriating the Past in
Organizational Change Management,” focuses on the various practices used by
managers to implement a performance management system in the firm’s operations
department. The study shows how managers skillfully used historical accounts to
simultaneously encourage employees to abandon those elements of the objective
past that were perceived to be impediments to change and embrace other elements
of the objective past that were perceived to enhance change. Koll and Jensen adopt a
Bourdieusian perspective of objective and subjective history, in which history can be
understood to be both objective (events and chronology) and subjective (something
carried in human consciousness) at the same time. The challenge for the managers is
to convert elements of objective history into subjective experience which, according
to Bourdieu, requires a sophisticated understanding of their commensurability. That
is, they must understand that the present is not simply what is objectively ex­peri­
enced in chronological time, but rather is premised on those elements of the past
that can be kept alive in our consciousness and thereby influence our experience of
the present.
A slightly different approach to analyzing and managing the inherent tension
between subjective and objective history is offered by William M. Foster, Elden
Wiebe, Diego M. Coraiola, François Bastien, and Roy Suddaby’s “Memory Work,”
an empirical study of corporate archivists and historians in Fortune 500 firms
(Chapter 13). Instead of focusing on differences between individual and collective
memories, Foster et al. draw attention to differences in corporate histories that arise
between historical narratives that draw from short- versus long-term organizational
memory. They observe that “the further away in the past memory reaches, the richer
the possibilities for reinterpreting the past and the larger the avenues for reconstruct­
ing past memories.” In other words, recent history is perceived as more objective than
long-term history and, as a result, is more amenable to reconstructive interpretation.
In Chapter 14, “Rhetorical History, Historical Metanarratives, and Rhetorical
Effectiveness,” Andrew Smith builds on the emerging theme of rhetorical history by
introducing the construct of meta-historical narratives. Smith’s core argument is that
any effort to use history strategically is constrained, not necessarily by the objective
elements of the past (the brute facts of the past), but, critically, by the degree to
which the argument is consistent with prevailing metanarratives of history in the
collective memory of the intended audience. Smith describes four prototypical his­
torical metanarratives—Marxist, Liberal Progressive, Dispensational, and Declinist.
This is an intriguing extension of the concept of rhetorical history, in large part
because it introduces a degree of constraint to the agency of history-based rhetorical
strategies. The latter are constrained not so much by what Suddaby and Foster (2017)
call “objective history” as by the extent of congruence with prevailing myths that
constitute acceptable historical accounts—i.e. “interpretive history.” This is an
important insight since the constraint Smith imposes on how history can be sub­ject­
ive­ly reconstructed depends not on “what actually happened” but, instead, on the
10 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies

extent to which a reconstructed history resonates with prevailing cultural myths or

metanarrative interpretations of the past.
Finally, Chapter 15 by David Musson, “The Life and Work of Edith Penrose:
Appreciating the Classics in Temporal and Historical Perspective,” illustrates the
weaving together of multiple histories, and the ways in which organizational and
particularly process scholars may learn from them. The chapter recounts the embed­
dedness of Edith Penrose’s work in a particular historical context and in relation to
her own personal history. It also reveals how others picked up and subjectively rein­
terpreted her work, which only became famous many years after she penned it,
recontextualized in other times and different circumstances. The chapter concludes
by reminding us of the value of the kind of rich, thick, and wonderfully detailed
scholarship that Edith Penrose and others of her time engaged in, and inviting us to
consider whether our own work, influenced by the frenetic chase of article publica­
tion, measures up to the standards of past eras.

1.3 An Emergent Model

The chapters in this volume not only help to define and elaborate the two paradigm-
defining puzzles for studies of time, temporality and history around the questions of
objectivity and agency, they can also be fitted into an emerging model defined by
four constructs that flow between the chapters but require further development and
clarification (Suddaby, 2016). The constructs are historical time, events, rhetorical
history, and historical metanarratives. As presented in the various chapters, these
constructs adopt an implicit hierarchy on a continuum from those constructs that,
in typical academic discourse, tend to be used more often to describe objective elem­
ents of history and temporality to those that tend to be used more often to describe
subjective elements.
Time tends to be presented more typically as an objective rather than a subjective
concept in mainstream research, despite the observation, strongly evident in many
of the chapters in this volume, that it can be both. This is the core argument of
Hassard et al., which builds on a long history of social science scholarship that forms
the core of process theory (Hernes, 2014). Time or temporality, however, is a foun­
dational construct inasmuch as it is the defining characteristic of both processes and
history (Büthe, 2002). Despite our awareness of its subjective–objective duality,
however, the vast bulk of research in the social sciences has tended to present time,
largely, as an objective construct (Kelly and McGrath, 1988). Many of the chapters in
this volume challenge us to reach beyond this.
Events are also a foundational construct of both process theory (Langley, 1999)
and history (Griffin, 1992). While theorists in both domains acknowledge that the
event is considered the primary building block of both social processes and societal
history, they also acknowledge that events are typically organized and presented in
narrative form (see Pentland (1999) for process theory and Butterfield (1981) for
 An Introduction 11

history). It is in the act of constructing the narrative, the selection of events to

include, their sequence, and emphasized significance, through which the objective
and subjective elements of events intermingle. Despite our awareness of this, his­tor­
ians tend to ascribe natural and reified properties to an event once it has been
recorded and preserved in documentary form. Events, therefore, rightly or wrongly
have acquired an aura of positivist objectivity, despite our awareness that they are
susceptible to interpretive reconstruction (see, for example, Hernes in this volume).
Events, thus, occupy a position of assumed objectivity that is slightly less than, but
close to, the assumed objectivity of time in academic discourse for both process the­
ory and historiography.
Rhetorical history, by contrast, has been explicitly theorized to stand at the inter­
section of objective and subjective understandings of the past (Suddaby et al., 2010;
Suddaby and Foster, 2017). Metanarratives build on the construct of meta-history
first defined by Hayden White (1973) who argued that historians do not “discover”
history so much as “make it” by taking events and organizing them in a narrative
structure, with sequence, plot, and ideological interpretation. Perhaps unsurpris­
ingly, the narrative plots of history fall into predictable archetypes that reinforce
prevailing cultural myths. On the objective–subjective hierarchy, metanarratives of
history occupy a position that is clearly more subjective than objective and, as dem­
onstrated by Smith’s argument (this volume), offer a counterpoint to the objectivity
test of positivist history (“did the events really happen?”) by posing a symbolic
standard of legitimacy (“does the story resonate as true?”).
Together the four constructs cohere along a continuum from those that are pre­
sented and understood to be constructs premised predominantly as objective under­
standings of time and history (including historical time and events) to those
constructs premised predominantly as subjective understandings of time and his­
tory (rhetorical history and historical metanarratives). The continuum (see
Figure 1.1) represents two poles by which both the legitimacy and validity of data
collected under the rubric of each construct are typically assessed. More particularly,
as the chapters by Koll and Jensen and Foster et al. suggest, as the continuum moves
from objective to subjective poles, the opportunities for human agency in the inter­
pretation of each construct increase.

Subjective High agency

Historical metanarrative

Rhetorical history
Narratives
Events

Historical time
Objective Low agency

Figure 1.1 Core constructs in historical organizational studies

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 She covered her face with her hands, and actually sobbed aloud.
Who had ever seen Mrs. Langrishe break down before? No one.
“Oh, dear Sir Gloster,” she began hysterically (she would need all
her fascinations now), “Lalla is so young” (only twenty-six). “She is
easily worked upon, she is in great request; the burlesque would
have fallen through—and it is for such a good charity—if she had
not, at the eleventh hour, consented to take a part.”
“I cannot accept your excuses, my dear madam” (waving both fat
hands, like the flappers of an angry seal). “I could never trust Miss
Paske again. Imagine the future Lady Sandilands, displaying her
arms—and, excuse me, her legs—in ungraceful antics for the
amusement of any one who chose to pay two or three rupees. At the
eleventh hour, I absolutely refuse to marry her!”
“You are not afraid of a breach of promise case?” asked Mrs.
Langrishe in despair. She was indeed dying in the last ditch.
“Not in the least,” was the bold reply. “No man—no gentleman is
compelled to marry an amateur mountebank! Oh, if my poor dear
mother had been present this night, I believe the shock would have
killed her! However, I am grateful for small mercies; I am thankful
that I saw Miss Paske in her true colours, before it was too late!”
“The invitations are out days ago; the trousseau is almost
complete; the presents have come in shoals; the cake is actually in
the house,—what am I to do?” pleaded unhappy Mrs. Langrishe, in a
transport of anguish.
“I’m sure I don’t know. I wash my hands of the whole affair. I am
going down to-morrow morning.”
“To-morrow morning!” repeated the unfortunate lady.
“Yes, I have no personal ill-will or ill-feeling against you, Mrs.
Langrishe,” he continued, as if he were offering her some superb
token of generosity. “It is not your fault, though I must confess that I
always thought you rather spoiled Miss Paske. However, in the
present instance, I hold you entirely blameless; but noblesse oblige
—and I—a—really could not ask my mother, and friends, to receive a
young a—a—lady—whose proper sphere is pantomime and—all that
sort of thing!” And waving his adieux, with a large tremulous hand,
he stalked out, and with him Mrs. Langrishe saw depart Lalla’s
brilliant prospects, her own reputation as a clever woman, and the
solid embodiment of an immense outlay of forbearance—flattery—
and rupees.
She sat for a long time over the dying wood fire, her face the
colour of its ashes.
At three o’clock in the morning Lalla (a true rake at heart) had not
returned, and her impending interview was thus postponed for twelve
hours. It was past three o’clock in the afternoon when Miss Paske
sauntered into her aunt’s room. Mrs. Langrishe was prostrate, from
the double effect of a sleepless night and a nervous headache.
Lalla listened to her outburst incredulously. She had dressed
herself with special care, collected all her bouquets, and had
resolved to enact a pretty little semi-penitential scene, with her stolid,
easy-going, somewhat dull fiancé. She expected him now at any
moment. What was this her aunt was saying? He had come; and
seen; and fled! Impossible! He had been present last night! For
once, she signally failed to sneer down, laugh down, or in any way
suppress or silence her relative. Oh! she had been mad to listen to
Toby Joy, she was always too ready to be over-persuaded by him.
He had had nothing on the hazard, whilst she had her all at stake.
And her magnificent prospects, her title, her diamonds, were at that
moment rapidly rumbling down hill in the rickety mail tonga.
The presents, the invitations, the breakfast—what people would
say, especially her own people, and the not unnatural elation of old
Mother Brande, on whom she had ruthlessly trampled—all these
things flashed through her mind.
She would, of course, be sent home immediately. What a horrible
outlook. To remain till the end of her days, as a sort of “object
lesson,” a terrible living example, in the corner of her father’s large
shabby country house. She would be pointed out to her younger
sisters, and to others, as the old maid who had had her chance, and
had danced it away!
 During all this time her aunt was speaking fluently, ceaselessly,
passionately, but to deaf ears—for Lalla was listening to her own
thoughts, and too much occupied by the clamour of an inward voice
to heed these outpourings.
At last one sentence struck her ear.
“And what is to be done with the cake, that has cost two hundred
rupees, and is now in my storeroom?” demanded Mrs. Langrishe,
dramatically.
“Raffle it,” cried Lalla, with a reckless laugh, “or have another
starvation picnic, and give them wedding-cake and sugar
ornaments!”
“Lalla!” shrieked her aunt, in a voice that would have sounded
strange even to her most intimate friends. “You are the most
abominable, unprincipled, devilish——”
“Oh, don’t bother!” interrupted Lalla, savagely; and she went out of
the room, and gave the door a bang that caused the very cheval-
glass to stagger in its place.
Once in her own bower, Lalla turned the key and flung herself into
an armchair, knocking, as she did so, a parcel off a table at her
elbow. She stooped and picked it up mechanically. It was a birthday-
book, one of her numerous wedding presents, and had arrived that
morning. She opened it in order to search for the verse opposite the
date of the day. Perhaps it would give her a clue as to her future
plans. For Lalla was extremely superstitious, and often shaped her
course by means of the most trivial instruments, which were
accepted by her as signs, tokens, and omens. Idiotic and
preposterous as it may appear, she attributed all her present
misfortune, not to her own deceit and folly—oh dear, no!—but to the
disastrous fact of having had a green dress in her trousseau, and
that was entirely Aunt Ida’s doing, no fault of hers.
Yes, Lalla had a curious temperament, and an imagination open to
every fantastic influence. As she whirled over the leaves of the book,
she said to herself, “I will take this as final, and abide by it, for bad or
good.”
 It was the eleventh of September, and the lines were—

“Retired from all, reserved, and coy,

To musing prone alone.”

Scott.

“What utter bosh!” she exclaimed, passionately; then, like all

dissatisfied inquirers, she determined to cast her first resolve to the
winds and have yet another experiment—one more dip into the
lottery of Fate.
“I’ll see what it says for the twentieth—my wedding day, that was
to have been——”
She turned to the page, and the lines were—

“He has not a shilling, nor has he a care.”

Anon.

“There, that settles it,” cried Lalla, tossing the book down and
moving quickly to her writing-table.

In a few hours the news of the ruptured alliance was all over
Shirani. Another piece of intelligence was faintly whispered, but not
credited, for it was really too much for the gossip-mongers to digest
all at once. This last item declared “that Miss Paske and Mr. Joy had
been seen flying down the cart road in a special tonga. They had run
away—she, from her aunt’s reproaches, and he, from his regimental
duty. They were both absent without leave.”
 For once rumour proved to be true in every particular. The pair
were married at the first church they came to, and subsequently
joined an English theatrical company that were touring in India, and
accompanied them to the Straits Settlements, China, and Japan.
Toby and Lalla act under the professional alias of “Mr. and Mrs.
Langrishe,” to the unspeakable indignation of the rightful owners of
the name.
Lalla had written her aunt a most wicked, flippant, impertinent,
heartless, in fact, diabolical letter, mentioning that the name of
Langrishe would now be surrounded by distinction and a lustre of
fame,—and for the first time.
It was many months before the stately Ida recovered her mental
equilibrium, and her spirits. The experiences she had undergone at
the hands of “a girl in a thousand” had aged her considerably; there
are now a good many lines in her smooth, ivory-tinted face, and
silver threads among her well-dressed brown locks.
Every one tacitly avoids the subject of broken-off engagements,
theatricals, and nieces in her presence; and it would be a truly bold
woman (such as is not Mrs. Brande) who would venture to inquire
“what had become of her charming niece, who was to have married
the baronet?”
 CHAPTER XLIV.
A ROSE—CARRIAGE PAID.

“Sahib, there is some one coming—in a jampan,” was the bearer’s

surprising announcement to Jervis, who was sitting under a tree in
the garden, busily engaged in painting a portrait of the bearer’s
grandson. Now, a jampan, or dandy, is a sort of hill sedan-chair, and
a mode of conveyance exclusively reserved for ladies.
Who could the lady be who was coming to the Pela Kothi? thought
the young man, starting to his feet. Honor? Impossible! Mrs. Brande?
No—the big picnic had dispersed ten days ago. He hurried out into
the verandah, and shaded his eyes with his hand. Yes, sure enough,
a dandy, borne by four men, and containing some one holding an
enormous white umbrella—some one being carried backwards up
the hill, followed by a native on a pony and two coolies with luggage.
The cortége were distinctly making for the house, for they turned off
the road into the direct path; but all that was visible was the white
umbrella bobbing along among the tall jungle grass—and the white
umbrella was approaching, as sure as fate.

For the last week Mark had noticed a great change in his father.
As his mind strengthened, his bodily health appeared to fail—the
hundred turns on the terrace were gradually lessening each morning
as the steps that paced them became feebler and feebler, and the
daily routine was now entirely set aside. An early ride had been
Mark’s chief relaxation, then breakfast with his father, afterwards he
read the paper to him, talked to him, walked with him, until about
three o’clock, when Major Jervis went to sleep—and slept almost
uninterruptedly till dinner time. Meanwhile his son walked over to see
one of the neighbours, or sketched—he had made quite a gallery of
types and portraits—or took his gun to try his luck among the hills.
The major was always at his best in the evening. He enjoyed a
game of chess, picquet, or écarté; and he liked to talk of his
experiences, his old friends and comrades, to smoke, to tell the
same long stories over and over again, and it was often one or two
o’clock in the morning ere his son could prevail on him to extinguish
his hookah and go to bed. But for the last week or ten days there
had been no late hours, and no strolling round the garden, or
basking in the sun, and Mark had never left the place. He feared that
his father was about to have some kind of an attack—whether bodily
or mental, he was too inexperienced to say—and he had despatched
a note that very morning to Mr. Burgess, asking him to ride over and
see his patient.
Meanwhile the visitor was coming steadily nearer and nearer, the
umbrella effectually concealing his or her identity. In due time the
dandy was carried up backwards into the verandah, turned right-
about-face, and set down. And behold—under the umbrella sat—Mr.
Pollitt!
Mr. Pollitt, looking exceedingly pleased with himself, and wearing a
neat tweed Norfolk jacket, a courier bag, and an Elwood helmet. In
one hand he clutched the umbrella, in the other an Indian Bradshaw.
“Uncle Dan!” almost shouted his nephew.
“There, my boy! Now, now, don’t drag me—don’t drag me. Let me
get out; give me time. I,” as he stood beside his nephew, “thought I
would take you by surprise.” And he shook his hand vigorously.
“A surprise—I should just think so! How on earth did you ever find
your way here? Why did you not write?”
“I’ll tell you everything presently—meanwhile, get me something to
drink. I don’t want lunch—get me a drink; and then walk me about
like a horse, for my legs are so stiff with sitting in that infernal chair,
that I believe I have lost the use of them.”
As Mr. Pollitt drank off a whisky and soda, his little eyes wandered
round the big dining-room with its faded magnificence, then strayed
to the matchless prospect from the open window, and finally rested
on his companion.
“Hullo, Mark, my boy! I see that this country has not agreed with
you.”
“Well, apparently it suits you, Uncle Dan,” was the smiling reply.
“You are looking very fit at any rate.”
“And how is your father?”
“Rather shaky, I am afraid; he has been ailing for the last week. He
is asleep just now.”
“Ah, very well, then you can explain me to him when he awakes;
and, meanwhile, I have a good many things to explain to you—why I
am here, for instance. So, take me outside, where I can stretch my
legs. There seems to be a great garden hereabouts.
“And now, to begin my story at the beginning,” continued Mr.
Pollitt, as they paced along side by side, “I got your letter, of course
—and of course it upset me terribly. I was like a lunatic, and it did not
smooth me down when some one kept saying, ‘I told you so; still
waters run deep!’ and so on. At first I was resolved to cut you adrift,
and to take no further notice of you. I was in this mind for a whole
fortnight, and then I got another communication that drove me stark
mad. I heard through my bankers that you had drawn on me for five
thousand pounds. Now you know, Mark,” coming to a full stop and
holding up a finger, “I have never grudged you money, have I? but to
take it like this. Don’t interrupt me. I had given Bostock and Bell a
quiet notification that I would honour your cheques to an additional
small extent, in case, I thought to myself, the boy runs short of a
couple of hundred or so—but five thousand! Yes, yes; I know you
never had it! Don’t interrupt, I tell you; let me go straight on. I wrote
out to Bombay at once, asking for particulars, and the answer came
back, ‘That Mr. Jervis had drawn the money personally, in notes and
gold, and had sailed for Australia—with a lady.’”
“Sailed for Australia with a lady!” repeated Mark, now halting in his
turn on the gravel walk.
 “Yes. At first I thought that I saw the whole thing as clear as print.
Your letter was a ruse to gain time. You knew I was dead against
your engagement to Miss Gordon, that I wanted you to come home,
so you had just taken the matter into your own hands, helped
yourself to what would start you fairly well, married the girl, and
emigrated to the colonies. I kept this idea to myself, I am now most
thankful to say, and I worried and worried over the business night
and day. The whole affair was unlike you; but it was not very unlike
Clarence. And where was Clarence? I thought of writing and making
more inquiries—indeed, the sheet of paper was actually before me—
when I suddenly said, ‘Why should not I go out myself, instead of
twopence-half-penny worth of paper?’ Mrs. Pollitt was away at
Homburg, I was alone, and, to tell you the truth, had no heart for
shooting or anything. To put the matter in a nutshell, instead of
writing, I went straight off to the P. and O. office and booked my
passage to Bombay by the following mail. I thought I would just go
out quietly and see for myself how the land lay. I came out the end of
August. Phew! I feel hot now, when I think of those days in the Red
Sea—a blazing sun, an iron steamer. I was like a lobster in a fish-
kettle! Needless to say, there were no lords or dukes on board; but I
travelled with what suited me better—an uncommonly clever lawyer
chap, who lives in Bombay, and put me up to everything. We
became great cronies, and as we smoked together a good bit, I told
him the whole of my affairs, and placed myself unreservedly in his
hands; and for once in my life I did a wise thing. He wanted me to
stay with him, but I put up at an hotel. However, he rigged me out,
engaged a first class Goanese servant for me, who speaks English,
and takes me entirely in charge, just as if I was a baby, and he set
about ferreting out the cheque business. I saw the cheque—it was
your signature sure enough; but the writing of ‘five thousand pounds’
was another hand—Clarence’s. I discovered that he had passed off
as you. His photograph was identified at the bank. I could not hear
anything about the lady; but she was entered in the passenger list for
Melbourne as ‘Mrs. Jervis.’ So exit Waring—and a nice child’s guide
he has proved!”
“That is not all,” burst out Mark. “He owes money all over the
place! I gave him the command of all our funds, and he squandered
every penny.”
“Serve you jolly well right,” returned his uncle with emphasis.
“Yes; it certainly did. I also gave him a cheque for five hundred to
pay off everything the day I left Shirani. I was so bothered, that I
conclude that I never filled in the cheque properly.”
“Evidently not, and your little oversight cost me four thousand five
hundred pounds. Well, never mind that now. I heard pretty stories of
Clarence at the hotel—people talking at the table beside me; how he
had gambled, betted, and played the deuce, and made a regular
cat’s-paw of the young fool he was travelling with, meaning you—an
undeniable fact. I then, having finished off Waring, came straight
away to look you up, Master Mark. Pedro, that’s my fellow, took great
care of me, and I have had as many adventures as would fill a
volume of Punch. I travelled in comfort as long as I was on the rail,
bar the heat; but once the rail came to an end, and I had to take to a
box—I am too old to begin riding—I was uncommonly sorry for
myself. However, everything I saw was new and interesting, the
scenery splendid; I came viâ Shirani, of course, and I broke my
journey at the Brandes—Sir Pelham and Lady Brande. By the way,
you never told me that he had a handle to his name! Eh, how was
that?”
“And how came you to know the Brandes?” asked his nephew
gravely.
“Ah, that is another story! And how came you to tell Sir Pelham
that there was insanity in the Jervis family, eh?”
“Because it is true. And I only heard it since I came here. My
grandfather died in Richmond lunatic asylum, my uncle jumped
overboard at sea, my father has now, thank God, a lucid interval, but
he has been insane for years.”
“Lies, every one of them!” blazed out Mr. Pollitt.
“Uncle Dan, what do you mean?” demanded Jervis, with trembling
lips and a pair of sternly searching eyes.
 “I know the Jervis family; why, man, I made it my business to study
it up. Your grandfather, a splendid old soldier, died at Richmond in
his own house, as sane as I am—saner, indeed, for I’ve been near
losing my senses several times of late. Your uncle, noble fellow,
jumped overboard to save life and lost his own. Your father’s head
was cracked by a fall. Who told you this other balderdash?”
“Fernandez, my father’s heir. He was informed by Mrs. Jervis, my
late step-mother. And it is all true what you tell me?”
“As true as I am a living man and sinner. Your father, no doubt,
believed every one of his people to be lunatics, a phase of his own
delusions.”
“Uncle Dan,” broke in his nephew, “I don’t think you can ever
realize what you have done for me. You have restored me—to life—
to hope. That was the reason why I gave up Miss Gordon.”
“And she is staunch to you still,” nodding his head emphatically.
“How on earth do you know?”
“Oh, I know a good deal, considering that I have only been a
fortnight in the country! Mark, my dear boy, I see that all this sudden
news is too much for you.”
“Go on—go on,” cried the other, white with excitement; “such news
is never too much for any one.”
“Well, you know, I came up by that maddening, twisting cart road
—I began to think it had no ending, like eternity. You recollect the
fountains, every few miles? At one of them, my fellows stopped to
drink and smoke, and there was a lady watering her horse—a
remarkably handsome girl, riding a fine black Arab. She had a white
puppy on her knee. She looked so pleasant, that though, as you
know, I’m a shy man, I ventured to speak to her, and asked her if the
road led to any place, short of China? or if she had ever heard of
Shirani? Yes, she lived there; and it was just four miles further. We
fell into talk, we were going the same way—her horse would not
stand the puppy at any price, but reared, and flung about like a mad
thing. She sat him splendidly, I will say, and held on to the dog like
grim death; she said he was tired—and the long and the short of it
was, that I took the pup in the dandy, and of all the nasty fidgeting
little brutes!—but that girl has such beautiful eyes—I could do
anything for her. And I’d like to see the man that could resist her! I
told her my name, and said I had come out after my nephew, and
asked her if she had ever heard of him—his name was Jervis. She
immediately became bright scarlet, I do assure you, and said ‘Yes.’ I
ventured to inquire her name. She said it was Gordon; and when I
replied, ‘I have heard of you,’ she grew, if possible, still redder. We
became as thick as thieves in no time. I got out and walked beside
her, actually carrying the pup—for he would not sit in the dandy
alone—and she told me a lot about the hill folk, and the mountain
peaks, and taught me a few words of Hindostani. I inquired about an
hotel, and she declared that there was none, and I must come to her
uncle’s; he and her aunt would be very glad to see me, for Mr. Jervis
was a particular friend of theirs. And is he not a particular friend of
yours too? I asked as pointedly as I knew how. And she looked me
straight in the face, and said ‘Yes.’ I stayed with the Brandes, to
make a long story short, and I was delighted with my visit. I now
know what people mean when they talk of Indian hospitality and
Indian friends. I believe I am getting quite attached to the country!”
“Then you had better remain out here, Uncle Dan, and live with
me.”
“A case of Mahomet and the mountain, eh? No, no, my boy; I
mean to fetch you home. I cannot spare you. At my age it is
impossible to throw out new roots.”
“And about Miss Gordon?” urged his listener impatiently.
“Honor, you mean. She was charming. She may have wished to
turn my poor silly old head, and she succeeded. She played the
violin—that settled me. Yesterday morning, before I left, she and I
were walking in the garden quite early, and she picked me a button-
hole; and I said, ‘I’m off now to see my boy. Will you give me a flower
for him, and have you any message?’ She made no answer for a full
minute; so, to put her at ease, I said, ‘I know all about it, my dear. I
was angry to think that he could leave me; but what was that to
leaving you!’ ‘He did what was right,’ she said, firing up like a sky-
rocket. When we had made peace again, she chose a flower with
most particular care, and said with a face as red as the rose, ‘You
may give him that, with my love.’ ‘Certainly,’ I said; ‘but the carriage
must be prepaid.’ At first she did not understand.”
“And I must confess that I am equally at sea,” admitted his
companion.
“Why, you young donkey, of course I made her give me a kiss.”
“Which is more than she has ever given me. Uncle Dan, you are
an extraordinarily able man. No wonder you made a great fortune!
You have brought me nothing but good news—my head feels reeling
—I can hardly grasp it all at once.”
“Well, my dear boy, I am glad of it. For it seems to me that you and
good news have been strangers for many a long day! And now,
suppose we go in, and find out if your father is awake?”
 CHAPTER XLV.
ONLY MR. JERVIS.

“I never saw such a change in any one!” faltered Mr. Pollitt, with
some emotion, as he followed Mark out of his father’s room. “He is
years younger than I am, and he is so cadaverous and shrunken that
he looks seventy at the very least. Poor fellow! he was in a
desperate state at first, when he thought I had come to carry you off.
I am glad you reassured him so completely. Well, as long as he is
here, he shall have you. I understand matters now; I have seen with
my own eyes, and one look is worth a ton of letters.”
Mr. Pollitt was enchanted with his present quarters, with the great
rambling house, its gardens, its situation, its quaint furniture. The
solitude and silence were an extraordinary refreshment to the little
world-worn cockney, after the roar of the London traffic, the throbbing
of engines, and the rumbling of railway carriages.
In honour of the new arrival, the khansamah sent up a remarkably
well-cooked dinner, not at all a jungle menu. There was excellent
soup, fresh fish from a mountain “tal” (a lake), entrées, a brace of hill
partridges, sweets, yellow cream, fruit, and black coffee. The claret
was a still further agreeable surprise; it had been laid in by a
connoisseur, and imported direct from Bordeaux viâ Pondicherry. But
the greatest surprise of all was presented in the person of the host
himself. With his heart warmed by sound old wine and the presence
of a sound old friend, Major Jervis kindled up into a semblance of
what he once had been. He talked connectedly and even brilliantly;
he laughed and joked, and listened with unaffected delight to the
history of Mr. Pollitt’s journey and adventures en route. His eyes
shone with something of their ancient fire; the lines and wrinkles
seemed to fade from his face; his voice was that of a man who could
still make himself heard on parade. Mr. Pollitt gazed and hearkened
in blank amazement; he was entranced and carried away breathless
by chronicles of hairbreadth escapes, tiger shooting, and elephant
catching; by tales of Eastern superstitions, of lucky and unlucky
horses, places, and people, stories of native life; of an English
nobleman who lived in a bazaar, earning his bread by repairing carts
and ekkas; of a young officer of good family and fortune, who had
lost his head about a native girl, had abandoned his country,
profession, and religion, and had adopted her people, and embraced
her faith; how, in vain, his wealthy English relatives had besought
him to return to them; how they had come out to seek him—had
argued and implored, and finally prevailed on him to abandon his
associates; and how, ere they had reached Bombay, they had lost
him—he, unable to break the spell of the siren, had escaped back to
his old haunts. He told of Englishmen who were lepers, living in sad
solitude among the hills, unknown and nameless; of the burning of
witches, of devil-worship, black magic, and human sacrifices. The
most thrilling and extraordinary items of his past were unrolled as a
scroll, and recapitulated in vivid and forcible language.
Who was this that held them spell-bound? thought his listeners.
Not the shattered wreck of the forenoon, but the soldier who had
seen much service, who had felt the pulse of events, who had
absorbed India through his eyes and ears—real India, during a
residence of thirty-five years in that mysterious, intoxicating,
gorgeous land! Of frontier skirmishes, kept out of the newspapers, of
friendly interchanges between foes in the field, of mysterious
disappearances, of men who had laid down their lives for their
country—heroes unknown to fame, whose deeds were unrecorded
by one line of print, whose shallow graves were marked by rotting
crosses on the bleak Afghan frontier.
Major Jervis kept his audience enthralled; even Mark’s attention
rarely wandered to a coolie who was at the moment running through
the wooded hillsides by the light of the cold keen stars, with a letter
in his loin-cloth addressed to “Miss Gordon.”
It was one o’clock before the party dispersed; and as Major Jervis
clapped his brother-in-law on the shoulder, with a hearty good night,
he added—
 “Who knows, Pollitt, but that I may be persuaded by your
eloquence to go home with you, after all?”

“My father is very ill,” said Mark, as he entered into his uncle’s
room at eight o’clock the next morning. “He wants to see you. I have
been with him since six o’clock; and, Uncle Dan, I’m afraid that this is
the end.”
Yes, there was no doubt about that, thought Mr. Pollitt; death was
surely written on the countenance that was turned to him. Last night
had been the final flicker before the flame of life went out.
The invalid was propped up in a chair by a window looking
towards the snows; but his face was ghastly, his breathing laboured.
“I’m glad you are here, Dan; glad we met once more.” And he
made a movement as if he would offer his wasted, helpless-looking
hand. “You and Mark wanted me to go home,” murmured the grey
lips; “and I am going—sooner than you thought.” He turned his dull
eyes and fixed them intently on his son. “God bless you, Mark,” he
whispered almost inarticulately. These were his last words.
When Mr. Burgess arrived, an hour later, he was dead.
“Died of a failure of the heart’s action, brought on by some
overpowering excitement;” but, as far as he could judge, “under any
circumstances he could not have outlived a week.” Such was the
missionary’s verdict.
“Ah, sahib!” cried Mahomed, with up-raised hands and eyes, “I
knew how it would be; there was the warning, the never-failing
warning at twelve o’clock last night—the voice.”
“What do you mean, Jan Mahomed?” Jervis returned quickly.
“The voice of a stranger, sahib, shouting in the yard. He was
calling for his horse. He was going a long journey. Surely the
Protector of the poor knows the truth of this? It is ever thus before a
man’s death—there is an order loudly spoken, ‘Gorah tiar hye!’”
(“Bring my horse!”)
Major Jervis was laid in the cantonment cemetery the following
morning. Mr. Burgess read the funeral service. Mark, Mr. Pollitt, and
one or two neighbours assembled round the grave, whilst afar off
stood servants, coolies, and many sick and poor, and lepers, to
whom the “dear brother,” now being laid to rest, had been a kind and
generous friend.
Fernandez arrived, in answer to a telegram, full of joy, bustle, and
importance. He could not understand the faces of the two
Englishmen. It was, as he frankly stated, a happy release. He
delighted in organization, change, and excitement, and undertook all
arrangements with zeal. He seemed to be everywhere at once. He
talked, strutted, gesticulated, and made such a stir that it seemed as
if ten men had been added to the party.
“The house and land are Mark’s,” he explained to Mr. Pollitt; “not
worth much,” shrugging his shoulders. “Everything else comes to me
—all the jewels. I wish I could show you those in the bank,” and his
eyes glittered as he thought of them. “But we will get out what is here
and let you have a look at them, for they are native and very
curious.”
A big safe was accordingly unlocked, the contents brought forth
and poured out, nay, heaped, upon a crimson-covered table, which
displayed them to advantage.
Mr. Pollitt sat down deliberately, to examine what evidently
represented an immense quantity of money, thus sunk in gold and
precious stones. There were aigrettes of diamonds, the jewels dull
and badly cut, but of extraordinarily great size. There were vases
and boxes of gold, and white and green jade inlaid with rubies. Khas-
dans, or betel boxes; jars for otto of roses; crescent ornaments for
the turban, set with emeralds and diamonds; gold anklets, with the
ends formed of elephant heads; forehead ornaments, set with great
pearls with pendant drops; plumes or turahs for turbans, with strings
of diamonds; armlets, bangles, rings for nose or ear, back-scratchers
of gold and ivory, glorious ropes of pearls, and many huge unset
emeralds and rubies. It was the collection and stores of generations,
now about to be scattered to the four winds by the plump and
restless hand of Fernandez Cardozo.
“I would like to give you something, Mark,” he said, carelessly
turning over piles of gold and precious stones as he spoke. “Will you
accept a present from me, my good fellow?”
“Of course he will,” said the little Londoner, with business-like
promptitude.
“You joked with me about wearing a—a—necklace, eh, you
remember, when I showed you a certain little bit of jewellery?”
Fernandez looked conscious, and actually believed that he was
blushing. “Well now, I am going to present you with one! Look at
this!” holding towards him a string of large emeralds, pierced and run
on a silken cord, and fastened off by a gold tassel. “These are for
your future bride, Mark my boy.”
“How did you know about her?” eyeing him gravely.
“Ho, ho, ho! Not a bad shot, I see! A bow drawn at a venture! Then
there is such a young lady?”
“Yes,” assented Mr. Pollitt, “and a very handsome young lady; you
may take my word for that!”
“What is she like?” turning to Mark with sparkling eyes. “Fair or
dark?”
“You shall see her some day, Fernandez. You must come to our
wedding.”
“I shall be most happy; but, my dear fellow, do describe her
appearance. I am such a ladies’ man, you know, such an admirer of
beauty.”
“Oh, she is tall, a head over you, Cardozo,” said Mr. Pollitt, “and
has dark hair, dark-grey eyes, and a very delicate colour, the air of a
princess.”
“Ah! then she shall have these pearls, instead of emeralds!” cried
Fernandez with enthusiasm, plunging his fat fingers into ropes of the
former, and holding them aloft for inspection. Four rows of large
pearls fastened off by a quaint old clasp, and a little tassel of rubies.
“They are far too valuable—it is much too handsome a gift,”
objected Mark, holding back instinctively.
“Nothing is too handsome for a handsome girl! and, for the matter
of value, the emeralds, though they look like so many balls of green
glass, beat them! If you refuse them in her name, I assure you I shall
be quite affronted; and, surely, it is only right that the major’s
daughter should have one small gift from amid all the begum’s
jewels.”
“I do not call that a small gift, Fernandez, and I am very much
obliged to you; but I will take it to Miss Gordon, and, later on, she will
thank you personally.”
“They are superb!” exclaimed Mr. Pollitt, rapturously. “I shall give
her diamonds—to correspond.”
Incongruous pair though they were, Mr. Pollitt and Mr. Cardozo hit
it off surprisingly well. Fernandez’s florid manner, Oriental ideas, and
ornamental language interested the hard-headed matter-of-fact little
Englishman. They walked and smoked and argued noisily together,
whilst Mark rode away to visit a certain newly-made grave, and to
take leave of the Persian lady.
“Ah, my friend, I have been waiting for you,” she said, rising from
the chabootra, or band-stand. “I thought you would surely come to
say farewell. Of course you are going away?”
“Yes. I am going away immediately.”
“And you will marry her—now—and gain your heart’s desire?”
“I hope so. And I am come to offer you what may fulfil yours!”
She stared at him with an air of almost fierce inquiry.
“It is the Yellow House. Will you accept it, for your lifetime? You
said you wished for a large bungalow in a central position—and
there you are!”
 “The Yellow House! Oh, it is too much. No, I could not take it, not
even for my poor. No, no, no!” and she shook her head with an air of
decision.
“Why not?” he argued; “it is mine to do with as I will; and there is
nothing that will give me greater pleasure than to feel that it is in your
hands—and the means of doing good—instead of standing closed,
empty, and falling into ruins. There is the garden for the patients to
walk in, the grazing for cows, the big rooms for wards. I will
thankfully pay an apothecary and assistant, and whatever is
necessary.”
“You wish to establish a sort of hill hospital for the poor in these
parts?” inquired the Persian, incredulously.
“Nay; you have already done that. I only ask leave to help you. If
you will not accept the Pela Kothi from me, take it from—us both—or
from Honor. You will not refuse her!”
“And shall I never see you again—or her?” she faltered.
“Who can say? Perhaps one day we may come and visit you. At
any rate, she will write to you.”
“But how can she write to me—a—a—Persian woman?” looking at
him with an intensity that was not pleasant to contemplate.
“At least, I shall write to you,” he rejoined, slightly disconcerted. “I
will send you a certain yearly sum to spend on the wretched lepers,
and in any charitable form that you may think best. Mr. Burgess will
translate my letters for you, and also any answers that you may be
good enough to send me. We do not wish to lose sight of you, if we
can help it.”
“We! how soon you have learnt to say it! You are so happy, where
you have hitherto known great misery, and the poor native woman
will soon have passed from your mind. You are released. I shall
never be released—but by death. You will be in another world—you,
and the Miss Sahib! Will you give her this from me? It is a little
charm. Nay, do not laugh. What am I but an ignorant, superstitious
native? Nevertheless, I mean well. This is an amulet against
sickness, poverty, or the loss of friends; an old hill woman gave it to