Temporal Miscoupling: The Challenges and Consequences of Enacting a Practice in Decline
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A practice firmly entrenched in one period can experience decline or even deinstitutionalization in another. However, at the organization level, practice abandonment can be a slow process. Organizations may continue to use a practice that is in decline or out of date, coupling asynchronously with a prior institutional environment. In this paper we develop the concept of temporal miscoupling and examine the challenges of performing a practice under this condition. Drawing on a field study of a labor strike in Canada, we examine the difficulties of inhabiting the practice of striking—picketing a workplace—with eroding political, legal, and cultural support; declining familiarity with the practice; and fading narratives to motivate and justify the practice. We show how strikers developed extemporaneous resources that gave local meaning and form to the practice. These improvised resources supported the practice but distorted historical meanings and performances. Our study expands the analytical repertoire of inhabited institutionalism by problematizing the temporal lag between institutional conditions and organizational practices for the on-the-ground enactment of practices. The extemporaneous resources generated in the context of temporal miscoupling threaten future enactments, indicating an important role for practice enactment in processes of decline and revitalization. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.16026 .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".