Third, the use of time and temporality for mak-ing and giving sense to unfinalized stories, antenar-ratives and future scenarios (see Boje 2011), includ-ing attention to issues, such as temporal depth, timeurgency and temporal orientation in promoting theneed for short or long-term strategies (see Jabri 2016,p. 97; Kunischet al. 2017, p. 1043)

“Since one cannot distinguish a figure without a background, the present does not meaningfully exist without a past” (emphasis added; 2001, p. 608). As the background, the past provides a bench­mark for the present against which comparisons can be made. And such com­parisons indicate whether the present is the same as the past or different from it.

So connections and the meaning they generate are funda­The Best of Times and the Worst of Timesmental, which is why the loss of meaning is so troubling—the systematic loss of meaning even more so.

Personal and organizational histories occupy prominent figure positions in the figure-ground dichotomy, and that such histories are used to cope with the future is indicated by several pieces of evidence.

The results presented in Bluedorn (2000e) and the Appendix consistently support the distinction between temporal depth and temporal focus. Concep­tually the two terms refer to different phenomena, and empirical measures of the two share so little variance in common that for practical purposes they can be regarded as orthogonal. Temporal depth is the distance looked into past and

However, Boyd and Zimbardo’s interest was not in comparing short-, mid-, and long-term temporal depths; rather, it was in examining the degree to which people were oriented to a transcendental future, and in exam­ining the extent to which this variation covaried with other factors such as age, gender, and ethnicity. This is a natural extension of the questions involved in research on general past, present, and future temporal orientations (e.g., Kluck- hohn and Strodtbeck 1961, pp. 13-15), orientations that at first glance appear similar to issues of temporal depth. However, as I have argued elsewhere in opposing the use of the temporal orientation label, these general orientations are more an issue of the general temporal direction or domain that an individ­ual or group may emphasize (Bluedorn 2000e) than the distance into each that the individual or group typically uses. The latter is the issue of temporal depth; the former, what I have called temporal focus (Bluedorn 2000e)

And the determination of organizational age illustrates the constructed, enacted nature of the past, because what at first glance seems like a simple, even objective matter becomes ambiguous when mergers and acquisitions are involved. Is the founding date the date that the oldest of the merger partners began operations, or is it the date when the last partners merged? Families can face the same ambiguities when one or both spouses have been married previously and they and their children combine to form new families. As the definition of the situation principle teaches (see Chapter 1), the important is­sue is when the people in the organization or family believe it was founded.

Steve Ferris and I found that organizational age was positively correlated with both past and future temporal depths, and that these relationships per­sisted after controlling for several organizational and environmental variables (Bluedorn and Ferris 2000). The older the organization, the further its mem­bers looked into both the past and the future, and the positive temporal depth correlations with the organization’s age may suggest why

The past leads to and influences the future, but the future does not influence the past.Thus El Sawy s research provided a second clue that past and future are re­lated, and it even added a causal direction (i.e., “A connection to the past fa­cilitates a connection to the future” [March 1999, p. 75])·

the result is a statistically significant positive correlation (see the Appendix). The proposed connection is accurate: The longer the respondent’s past temporal depth, the longer the respondent’s future temporal depth.

Perhaps the most noteworthy of the differ­ences is that each of the future regions extends much further into the future than their past counterparts extend into the past. The short-term future ex­tends about five times further than does the recent past; the mid-term future, about three-and-one-third times as far as the middling past; and the long­term future, about twice as far as the long-ago past. So although the steplike pattern is similar for both the past and future regions, the future depths extend over substantially larger amounts of time than do those in the past

the temporal distances into the past and future that indi­viduals and collectivities typically consider when contemplating events that havehappened, may have happened, or may happen.