Time for Business: Business Ethics, Sustainability, and Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Messianic Time’

Authors

  • Jeremy Kidwell University of Edinburgh, UK

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3384/de-ethica.2001-8819.152339

Keywords:

Abstract

Contemporary business continues to intensify its radical relation to time. The New York Stock Exchange recently announced that in pursuing (as traders call it) the ‘race to zero’ they will begin using laser technology originally developed for military communications to send information about trades nearly at the speed of light. This is just one example of short-term temporal rhythms embedded in the practices of contemporary firms which watch their stock price on an hourly basis, report their earnings quarterly, and dissolve future consequences and costs through discounting procedures. There is reason to believe that these radical conceptions of time and its passing impair the ability of businesses to function in a morally coherent manner. In the spirit of other recent critiques of modern temporality such as David Couzen Hoys The Time of Our Lives, in this paper, I present a critique of the temporality of modern business. In response, I assess the recent attempt to provide an alternative account of temporality using theological concepts by Giorgio Agamben. I argue that Agamben’s more integrative account of messianic time provides a richer ambitemporal account which might provide a viable temporality for a new sustainable economic future.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, translated by Patricia Dailey. Redwood: Stanford University Press, 2005 [2000].

Agamben, Giorgio. The Church and the Kingdom, translated by Leland De la Durantaye. New York: Seagull Books, 2012 [2010].

Barton, Dominic. ‘Capitalism for the Long Term’, Harvard Business Review 89:3 (2011), pp. 84-91.

Barton, Dominic, and Mark Wiseman. ‘Focusing Capital on the Long Term’, Harvard Business Review 92:1/2 (2014), pp. 44-51.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1986.

Bittner, Rüdiger. ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-century Answers and Twentieth-century Questions, edited by James Schmidt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 345-358.

Easley, David, Marcos Lopez de Prado, and Maureen O’Hara. ‘The Microstructure of the Flash Crash: Flow Toxicity, Liquidity Crashes and the Probability of Informed Trading’, The Journal of Portfolio Management 37:2 (2011), pp. 118-128. DOI: 10.3905/jpm.2011.37.2.118

Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Glennie, Paul, and Nigel J. Thrift. ‘Reworking E. P. Thompson’s “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism”’, Time & Society 5:3 (1996), pp. 275-299. DOI: 10.1177/0961463X96005003001

Glennie, Paul, and Nigel J. Thrift. Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England And Wales 1300-1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199278206.001.0001

Granqvist, Nina and Robin Gustafsson. Temporal Institutional Work. Academy of Management Journal (forthcoming). DOI: 10.5465/amj.2013.0416

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996 [1927].

Johnson, Neil, Guannan Zhao, Eric Hunsader, Jing Meng, Amith Ravindar, Spencer Carran and Brian Tivnan. ‘Financial Black Swans Driven by Ultrafast Machine Ecology’, working paper, February 7 (2012). Online at http://arxiv.org/abs/120z.1448 (accessed 2015-07-28).

Johnston, Lucas F. Religion and Sustainability: Social Movements and the Politics of the Environment. Sheffield and Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2013.

Kirilenko, Andrei A., Albert S. Kyle, Mehrdad Samadi and Tugkan Tuzun. ‘The Flash Crash: The Impact of High Frequency Trading on An Electronic Market’, working paper, May 5 (2014). Online at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? abstract_id=1686004 (accessed 2015-07-12).

Lash, Scott, and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage, 1994.

Laverty, Kevin J. ‘Economic short-termism: The Debate, the Unresolved Issues, and the Implications for Management Practice and Research’, Academy of Management Review 21:3 (1996), pp. 825-860.

MacKenzie, Donald. ‘A Sociology of Algorithms: High-Frequency Trading and the Shaping of Markets’. Unpublished paper (2014). Online at: http://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/156298/Algorithms25.pdf (accessed 2015-07-08).

Marginson, David, and Laurie McAulay. ‘Exploring the Debate on Short-termism: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis’, Strategic Management Journal 29:3 (2008), pp. 273-292. DOI: 10.1002/smj.657

Marramao, Giacomo. Kairós: Towards an Ontology of ‘Due Time’. Aurora, Colorado: Davies Group Publishers, 2007.

Muers, Rachel. Living for the Future: Theological Ethics for Coming Generations. London and New York: T & T Clark, 2008.

Perlow, Leslie A, Gerardo A. Okhuysen and Nelson P. Repenning. ‘The Speed Trap: Exploring the Relationship Between Decision Making and Temporal Context’, Academy of Management Journal 45:5 (2002), pp. 931-955. DOI: 10.2307/3069323

Reinecke, Juliane, and Shaz Ansari. ‘When Times Collide: Temporal Brokerage at the Intersection of Markets and Developments’, Academy of Management Journal 58:2 (2015), pp. 618-648. DOI: 10.5465/amj.2012.1004

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Slawinski, Natalie, and Pratima Bansal. ‘A Matter of Time: The Temporal Perspectives of Organizational Responses to Climate Change’, Organization Studies 33:11 (2012), pp. 1537-1563. DOI: 10.1177/0170840612463319

Stern, Nicholas. The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511817434

Thompson, E P. ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present 38:1 (1967), pp. 56-97. DOI: 10.1093/past/38.1.56

Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology (Combined Volume). Digswell Place: James Nisbet, 1968.

Ziegler, Philip G. ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer – An Ethics of God’s Apocalypse?’, Modern Theology 23:4 (2007), pp. 579- 594. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0025.2007.00410.x

Downloads

Published

2016-01-28

How to Cite

Kidwell, J. (2016) “Time for Business: Business Ethics, Sustainability, and Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Messianic Time’”, De Ethica, 2(3), pp. 39–51. doi: 10.3384/de-ethica.2001-8819.152339.

Issue

Section

Articles