Eternal Today

This chapter focuses on temporality in managerial strategy making. It adopts an ‘in-time’ view to examine strategy making as the fluidity of the present experience and draws on a longitudinal, real-time study in a small Finnish software company. It shows five manifestations of ‘in-time’ processuality in strategy making, and identifies a temporality paradox that arises from the engagement of managers with two contradictory times: constructed linear ‘over time’ and experienced, becoming ‘in time’. These findings lead to the re-evaluation of the nature of intention in strategy making, and the authors elaborate the constitutive relation between time as ‘the passage of nature’ and human agency. Consequently, they argue that temporality should not be treated merely as an objective background or a subjective managerial orientation, but as a fundamental characteristic of processuality that defines the dynamics of strategy making.