eople prefer to know who else is present in a shared space, and they usethis awareness to guide their work

create the effect of temporal symmetry, of the group sharing a moment, even though individual members clearly read the message at different moments.

The notion of temporal structuring views "real time" not as an inherent property of Internet­based activities, or an inevitable consequence of technol­ogy use, but as an enacted temporal structure, reflecting the decisions people have made about how they wish to structure their activities, both on or off the Internet. As an alternative to the idea of '·real time," Bennett and Wei II ( 1997) have suggested the notion of "real-enough time," proposing that people design their process and technology infrastructures to accommodate variable timing demands, which are contingent on task and context. We believe such "real-enough" temporal structures are important ar­eas of further empirical investigation, allowing us to move beyond the fixation on a singular, objective "real time" to recognize the opportunities people have to (re)shape the range of temporal structures that shape their lives.

The notion of temporal structuring we have de­veloped here suggests instead that people enact multiple, heterogeneous, and shifting temporal structures in all as­pects of their lives.

Our empirical example also highlighted the value of achieving virtual temporal symmetry for members of a geographically dispersed community. As electronic me­dia become increasingly central to organizational life, in­dividuals may use asynchronous media in various ways to shape devices of virtual symmetry that help them co­ordinate across geographical distance and across multiple temporal structures. This suggests that when studying the use of electronic media, researchers should pay attention to the conditions in which virtual temporal symmetry may be enacted to coordinate distributed activities, and with what consequences. Interesting questions for empirical research include the following. As work groups in orga­nizations become more geographically dispersed and/or more dependent on electronic media, do members enact virtual temporal symmetry for certain purposes? If so, for which types of purposes? And how? If not, how do such work groups achieve temporal coordination?

By examining a community's repertoire of temporal struc­tures, we can understand the variety of ways in which community members' actions (re)produce the different temporal structures they constitute through their ongoing practices

The notion of temporal structuring focuses attention on what people actually do temporally in their practices, and how in such ongoing and situated activity they shape and are shaped by particular temporal structures. By exam­ining when people do what they do in their practices, we can identify what temporal structures shape and are shaped (often concurrently) by members of a community; how these interact; whether they are interrelated, over­lapping, and nested, or separate and distinct; and the ex­tent to which they are compatible, complementary, or contradictory.

In all these cases, the notion of temporal structuring through ongoing practices helps us understand and bridge the temporal oppositions underlying the research litera­ture. We tum now to an empirical example to demonstrate how this perspective can offer a new understanding of the temporal conditions and consequences of organizational life.

In practice, however. an open-ended or closed temporal orientation is not a stable property of occupational groups, but an emergent property of the temporal structures being enacted at a given moment by the groups' members.

Viewed from a practice perspective, the distinction be­tween cyclic and linear time blurs because it depends on the observer's point of view and moment of observation. In particular cases, simply shifting the observer's vantage point (e.g., from the corporate suite to the factory floor) or changing the period of observation (e.g., from a week to a year) may make either the cyclic or the linear aspect of ongoing practices more salient.

An emphasis on the cyclic temporality of organizational life also underpins the work on entrain­ment, developed in the natural sciences and gaining cur­rency in organization studies. Defined as "the adjustment of the pace or cycle of one activity to match or synchro­nize with that of another" (Ancona and Chong 1996, p. 251 ), entrainment has been used to account for a variety of organizational phenomena displaying coordinated or synchronized temporal cycles (Ancona and Chong 1996, Clark 1990, Gersick 1994, McGrath 1990).

In spite of the general movement from particular to­wards universal notions of time (Castells 1996, Giddens 1990, Zerubavel 1981 ), we can see that in use, all uni versa! temporal structures must be particularized to local contexts because they are enacted through the situated practices of specific community members in specific locations and time zones.

One such op­position is that between universal (global, standardized, acontextual) and particular (local, situated, context­specific) time.

Table 1 Different Perspectives on Time in Organizations

That is, people are purposive, knowledgeable, adaptive, and inventive ac­tors who, while they are shaped by established temporal structures, can also choose (whether explicitly or implic­itly) to (re)shape those temporal structures to accomplish their situated and dynamic ends.

scholars have begun to recognize the importance of what Nowotny (1992, p. 424) has termed pluritemporalism­"the existence of a plurality of different modes of social time(s) which may exist side by side." Our structuring lens sees this not so much as the existence of multiple times, but as the ongoing constitution of multiple tem­poral structures in people"s everyday practices.

Like social structures in general (Giddens 1984 ), tem­poral structures simultaneously constrain and enable.

While adopting one side or the other of this dichotomy may offer re­searchers analytic advantages in their temporal studies of organizations, difficulties arise when these positions are treated-not as conceptual tools-but as inherent prop­erties of time. Focusing on one side or the other misses seeing how temporal structures emerge from and are em­bedded in the varied and ongoing social practices of peo­ple in different communities and historical periods, and at the same time how such temporal structures powerfully shape those practices in turn. By focusing on what or­ganizational members actually do, our practice-based per­spective on temporal structuring may offer new insights into how people construct and reconstruct the temporal conditions that shape their lives.

Thus temporal structures, like all social structures (Giddens 1984), are both the medium and the outcome of people's recurrent practices.

This in­tegration suggests that time is instantiated in organiza­tional life through a process of temporal structuring,1 where people (re)produce (and occasionally change) tem­poral structures to orient their ongoing activities.

We contribute to this discussion within organizational re­search by offering an alternative third view-that time is experienced in organizational life through a process of temporal structuring that characterizes people's everyday engagement in the world. As part of this engagement, people produce and reproduce what can be seen to be temporal structures to guide, orient, and coordinate their ongoing activities.

emporal structures here are under­stood as both shaping and being shaped by ongoing hu­man action, and thus as neither independent of human action (because shaped in action), nor fully determined by human action (because shaping that action). Such a view allows us to bridge the gap between objective and subjective understandings of time by recognizing the ac­tive role of people in shaping the temporal contours of their lives, while also acknowledging the way in which people's actions are shaped by structural conditions out­side their immediate control.

implies the virtual inseparability of semantics from syntactics, and, indeed, Saussure's followers are often quite appropriately called structuralists, as they view signs not so much in terms of their substantive "content" as in terms of the ways in which they are formally related to other signs (i.e., in terms of the structure of the symbolic system to which they belong). More specifically, they tend to focus particularly on the formal relation of opposition or contrast, because, "in any semiological system, whatever distin- guishes one sign from the oth