Manipulating Time: Temporal Agency and Entrepreneurial Action

Abstract

In recent work, scholars have taken important steps to explicate the role of time in theories of entrepreneurial action. Our research builds on these approaches in a number of important ways by further theorizing the inextricable bond and ongoing interplay between entrepreneurs and their respective temporal contexts. First, we identify and develop distinctions between the enabling and constraining influences of two different temporal forms: time-as-interval and time-as-emergence. Second, we build new theory to account for the temporal agency of entrepreneurship in order to address the constraining and enabling influences of time. Central to our approach is a re-conceptualization of time not simply as the medium of entrepreneurial agency, but as the target or object of entrepreneurial agency, which entrepreneurs attempt to manipulate through six types of action: conversion, inversion, subversion, diversion, perversion, and reversion. We ground our framework in common business venturing practices, discussing the wide-ranging implications of how the manipulation of time provides novel means for entrepreneurs to mitigate uncertainty in their attempt to achieve desired outcomes.