Time: April 15, 2026, 10:00 - 11:30
Speaker: Dr. Jeremy Aroles, School for Business and Society, University of York
Chair: Dr. Wei Wu, School of Management, Zhejiang University
Venue: Room A723, School of Management, Zhejiang University
Title:
Constructing temporal legitimacy under historical scarcity
Abstract:
Organizations in nascent categories face a distinctive legitimation challenge as they must establish temporal credibility – a persuasive account of where they came from and where they are going – when both the organisational past and the sector’s direction are unsettled. Existing research on uses of the past has primarily examined organisations with rich temporal resources; we know less about how temporal legitimation works when the past itself must be constructed rather than curated. We ask: How do actors in nascent organisational categories construct temporal legitimacy when the temporal resources available to them are scarce? We address this question through a qualitative study of coworking spaces across four global cities, through which we identify five temporal legitimation strategies operating under two interdependent mechanisms: constructing temporal ground (manufacturing a credible past) and claiming temporal trajectory (naturalising a credible future). We theorise these as forming an iterative cycle in which constructed depth makes trajectory claims credible, while projected futures redefine which pasts are usable. We contribute to research on legitimation in nascent categories by theorising temporal legitimation as a distinct mechanism of category construction, and to the uses-of-the-past literature by showing how temporal work operates under conditions of historical scarcity.
Biography:
Jeremy Aroles is an Associate Professor in Organization Studies. He joined the School for Business and Society at the University of York in December 2021, where he currently serves as Deputy Dean. Prior to this, he held academic positions at Durham University and the University of Manchester, where he earned his PhD in 2016.
Dr. Aroles is currently an Associate Editor of Human Relations and Work, Employment and Society, and a Guest Editor for the British Journal of Management and the Journal of Business Ethics. He also serves on the editorial boards of leading journals such as Journal of Management Studies and Organization.
His research focuses on emerging forms of work, the management of cultural institutions, and the complex relationships between fiction and organizational life. His work has been published in top international journals, including MIS Quarterly, Organization Science, Organization Studies, European Journal of Information Systems, Work, Employment and Society, Organization, Management Learning, and New Technology, Work and Employment.
https://www.york.ac.uk/business-society/people/jeremy-aroles/
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