Constructing temporal legitimacy under historical scarcity

Speaker: Dr. Jeremy Aroles

Venue: Room A723, School of Management Building, Zijingang Campus

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.