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Despite their centrality to organizing – acknowledged by several theorists – unplanned conversations are often marginalized in organizational theory. To remedy this oversight, we recenter attention on this understudied aspect of organizing. We draw on the affordances perspective to elaborate on the spatial and temporal factors influencing unplanned conversations.

This conceptual paper integrates multidisciplinary literature on unplanned conversations to identify a range of spatiotemporal factors influencing unplanned conversations. Our approach emphasizes how various situational factors afford or hinder opportunities for unplanned conversations among organizational members.

Unplanned conversations were precisely defined as opportunistic or spontaneous conversations, characterized by the absence of pre-planning, that can be work or non-work-related. Then, the characteristics of unplanned conversations (emergent, episodic and brief, interrelated, convenient, and improvisational) were outlined, indicating their distinct organizing and structuring capabilities. The spatial (i.e. spatial proximity, visibility, legitimacy, and psychological safety) and temporal (i.e. work time pressure, work history, work expertise, and work routineness) factors identified in the study both afford and constrain individuals’ unplanned conversations. The empirically testable propositions offered in the study have significant theoretical and practical implications.

This study enriches our understanding of unplanned conversations by offering a precise conceptual definition, outlining their essential characteristics, and underscoring their theoretical and practical significance in organizing. The study highlights the need for organizations to consider the spatiotemporal factors that influence unplanned conversations.

Volume 19 of Research in Organizational Change and Development includes chapters by an international diverse set of authors including Michael Beer, Victor J. Friedman, Luis Felipe Gómez and Dawna I. Ballard, Ethan S. Bernstein and Frank J. Barrett, Karen J. Jansen and David A. Hofmann, Guido Maes and Geert Van Hootegem, Tobias Fredberg, Flemming Norrgren and Abraham B. (Rami) Shani, and William A. Pasmore. The ideas expressed by these authors are as diverse as their backgrounds.

Dawna I. Ballard (PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2002) is associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines organizational temporality, with particular attention to ways in which time shapes and is shaped by a range of communication processes. Her published research appears in outlets such as Communication Research, Communication Monographs, Small Group Research, Management Communication Quarterly, as well as several interdisciplinary edited volumes, including Time and Memory, Workplace Temporalities, and Time in Organizational Research.

The central focus of this chapter is the mutually constitutive relationship between time and group interaction. Groups shape individuals' experiences of time and individuals' experiences of time enable and constrain their group interactions. The chapter begins with a brief history of time in groups to situate early concerns which still shape many contemporary investigations, and then examines several theoretical perspectives as well as midrange frameworks and constructs which inform research on time and group communication. The chapter concludes with a summary and directions for future research in the area.

The centrality of time to the quality and experience of our lives has led scholars from a variety of disciplines to consider its social origins, including temporal differences among social collectives. Consistent across their accounts is the acknowledgment that time is co-constructed by people via their communicative interactions and formalized through the use of symbols. The goal of this chapter is to build on these extant socio-historical accounts – which explain temporal commodification, construction, and compression in Western, industrialized organizations – to offer a perspective that is grounded in communication and premised on human agency. Specifically, it takes a chronemic approach to interrogating time in the workplace, exploring how time is a symbolic construction emergent through human interaction. It examines McGrath and Kelly's (1986) model of social entrainment as relevant to the interactional bases of time, and utilizes it and structuration theory to consider the mediation and interpenetration of four oft-cited practices in the emergence of a Westernized time orientation: industrial capitalism, the Protestant work ethic, the mechanized clock, and standardized time zones. Surrounded by contemporary workplace discussions on managing the demands of personal–professional times, this analysis employs themes of temporal commodification, construction, and compression to explore the influence of these socio-historical developments in shaping norms about the time and timing of work.

The concept that an organization's actions or inactions constrain or enhance its future options and outcomes and – ultimately – its long-term survival, is here referred to as the organization's viability. Following a dynamic capabilities framework, we identify two communication practices that help develop both transactive memory systems and a firm's long-term viability, information allocation and collective reflexivity, and call for the development of others. We discuss the interrelationship of these two practices as nurturing the development of transactive memory systems critical for organizational long-term viability. We then discuss organizational structures that prompt or constrain the development of these two communication practices – organizational members’ perceived environmental uncertainty, perceptions of time as scarce, feedback cycles between actions and outcomes, and organizational members’ temporal focus – and offer propositions concerning these relationships. We emphasize the relevance of TMS through the exploration of three characteristics of the relationship between TMS and the long-term viability of organizations. Finally, we conclude with recommendations for organizational development practitioners for fostering TMS through the facilitation of sites for collective reflexivity.