Organizational Time as Lived Temporality: Acceleration, Embodiment, and Existential Positioning in Digital Work

Abstract

This article examines the phenomenological constitution of time in digital work, focusing on how senior IT professionals retrospectively articulate the relation between organizational rhythms, embodied experience, and biographical meaning. Based on an anamnetic and metaphor-oriented analysis of interviews with ten senior professionals from the emerging technology hub of Iași, Romania, the study approaches organizations as intersubjective worlds of embodied practice, structured by shared rhythms, technological mediation, and historically sedimented forms of corporeal participation. Drawing on theories of organizational temporality, acceleration, embodiment, and historical intercorporeality, the analysis shows how participants make sense of their professional trajectories through recurring metaphors of immersion, gravitation, impossible puzzles, hamster wheels, and chronophagous machines. These figurative constructions condense complex experiences of synchronization and desynchronization, revealing how work may be lived either as resonance, continuity, and existential investment, or as fragmentation, bodily dissonance, exhaustion, and alienation. The findings suggest that digital work cannot be understood only as a sequence of tasks, deadlines, and technological cycles, but must also be interpreted as a spatio-temporal field in which the body, memory, and professional identity are gradually formed. In this sense, organizational life appears as an existential negotiation between acceleration and sedimentation, collective rhythm and subjective temporality, technological demands and the embodied history of the working subject.

1. Introduction

The ubiquity of social acceleration in what Rosa (2013, 2019) calls late modernity increasingly affects the subjective experience of time in a world of work characterized by the compression of the present (Orlikowski 2007; Aroles et al. 2019).

As a knowledge-intensive form of collaborative activity, mediated by technology and structured by relentless temporal demands, digital work involves sustained emotional as well as cognitive engagement (Orlikowski 2007; Gregg 2011). As the boundaries between intimate and professional life become increasingly permeable (Aroles et al. 2019; Gregg 2011), time itself is progressively transformed into a resource made available to the organization under a regime of instant access (Gregg 2011; Wajcman 2015). In this context, organizational practices do not merely structure schedules or workflows; they directly shape the subjective perception of time’s passage (Orlikowski and Yates 2002; Hernes 2022). Temporality thus emerges from the sustained interaction between organizational rhythms, individual perception, and the broader psychosocial context in which work is experienced (Langley et al. 2013; Reinecke et al. 2020).

The cardinal values of deadline culture are vibrant energy, youth, unconditional availability, motivation, and proved capacity for self-control (Gregg 2011; Shilling 2003; Turner 2008). In this type of organizational discourse, the employee is valued and thematized primarily as a functional resource (Shilling 2003; Gregg 2011; Turner 2008). Yet the intensity of this instrumentalization brings subjective experience into sharper focus: affective states become more salient precisely because they shape how time is lived, compressing or dilating the present, and retrospectively reconfiguring the memory of its passage (Droit-Volet and Wearden 2016; Droit-Volet 2018; Droit-Volet et al. 2018).

As social micro-systems, companies today can maintain their cohesion and stability only through continuous acceleration (Hollstein and Rosa 2023; Rosa 2013, 2019). In IT in particular, any slowing down means stagnation, and any stagnation foreshadows an existential crisis. If the pace of innovation, new product releases, updates and code optimizations, and expansion into new markets slows down, the organization’s competitiveness enters a rapid decline. The interconnectivity with which technology has infused the world of work produces efficiency, but it also transfers responsibility for managing time onto the individual. The compression of task time, the insidious tension of instantaneity, generates stress and anxiety. The constant pressure of deadlines, together with the overlap between work projects and private-life commitments, may erode individuals’ control over their own time and make it increasingly difficult for them to remain anchored in the present (Rosa 2010, 2013; Wajcman 2015).

Against this background, lived time concerns the gradual assimilation of experience into a subjective temporal continuity that cannot be reduced to the external tempo of work. A persistent mismatch between organizational rhythms and this slower process of biographical integration may be experienced as desynchronization. Digitalized intra-organizational interaction can further shape this experience by reinforcing temporal structures that fragment everyday life (Czerwinski et al. 2004; Emirbayer and Mische 1998; Flaherty 2003; Hitlin and Elder 2007; Orlikowski and Yates 2002; Rosa 2003). Organizational research has accordingly examined how actors make sense of past, present, and future (Shipp and Jansen 2021; Hernes and Obstfeld 2022), experience waiting and changing organizational rhythms (Bailey and Suddaby 2023; Söderlund and Pemsel 2022; Kunzl and Messner 2023; Erickson and Wajcman 2023), and negotiate the temporal consequences of digital connectivity and continual availability (Gregg 2011; Mazmanian et al. 2013; Wajcman 2015).

Research on temporality in IT and digitally mediated work has addressed several related themes. Studies have examined temporal coordination in distributed and virtual teams, including time-zone separation and asynchronous communication (Massey et al. 2003; Espinosa et al. 2007, 2015; Carmel et al. 2010), as well as project time, deadlines, and schedule pressure in information systems development (Nandhakumar 2002; Kuutila et al. 2020; O’Connor et al. 2024). Other research has focused on temporal structures, routines, and organizational rhythms (Orlikowski and Yates 2002; Vial and Rivard 2026), and on how digital technologies intensify, accelerate, and extend working time beyond conventional boundaries (Jauréguiberry 2000; Green 2002; Rennecker and Godwin 2005; Mazmanian et al. 2013; Wajcman 2015). More interpretive work has examined temporal dissonance, affective temporal experience, and changing experiences of working-time intensity and duration (Conway and Limayem 2011; Shen et al. 2015; Zamani and Spanaki 2023; Howcroft and Taylor 2024). Reviews nevertheless suggest that clock-based and activity-centred approaches remain dominant, while experiential understandings of temporality are comparatively less developed (Shen et al. 2015; O’Connor et al. 2023).

Two contemporary directions stand out in this regard, addressing complementary dimensions of organizational temporality: how it is lived as embodied, situated, and intersubjective (Mooney 2022), and how it is retrospectively interpreted across professional trajectories.

Phenomenologically informed research in IT has increasingly explored the lived temporal dimensions of technologically mediated work. van Fenema and Qureshi (2004) examine how distributed software developers adapt to temporal dispersion across time zones through changing communication and work practices. Singh and Strobel (2023) show how agile developers experience the recurrent, time-bounded rhythm of daily stand-up meetings, including tensions arising from their limited duration. More recently, Michels et al. (2024, p. 55) identify “temporal overwhelm” as a distinct dimension of software developers’ lived experience of work.

Biographical approaches take a longer-term perspective, examining how professional experiences are retrospectively interpreted and integrated across extended career trajectories. Maclean and Harvey (2026) show how professional trajectories unfold through long-term temporal continuities and transformative critical incidents. In the IT domain, Pilch (2023) adopts a biographical perspective to examine how professionals retrospectively construct the meaning of their careers, while Seddighi and Corneliussen (2021) draw on professional-life histories to explore how ICT professionals negotiate work, time, and broader life demands. Such studies move beyond immediate workplace experience and highlight the retrospective interpretation of professional trajectories over extended periods.

Although these perspectives address different dimensions of temporal experience, the connection between them remains less developed. Phenomenologically informed research foregrounds how organizational rhythms are lived as embodied experience, whereas biographical research shows how professional experience is retrospectively organized and interpreted across the course of a career. Less attention has been paid to how recurrent experiences of synchronization, acceleration, temporal pressure, or dissonance become sedimented through prolonged exposure to organizational rhythms and subsequently incorporated into professional biography. The retrospective biographical meaning of embodied temporal experience therefore remains comparatively underexplored.

This question is particularly relevant in the Eastern European IT context, where research on digital work has focused primarily on labour-market patterns, working conditions, and broader structural transformations (Remeikienė et al. 2022). In Romania, research has only recently begun to address experiential dimensions of technologically mediated work. Barbu et al. (2025) examine employees’ perceptions of workplace technologies and their implications for satisfaction and performance, while Similea et al. (2026) explore how generative AI reshapes task duration, sequencing, and temporal agency. The retrospective sedimentation of organizational temporality across extended IT careers, however, remains largely unexplored.

The present exploratory study addresses this intersection. Drawing on Küpers’ (2015) concept of historical intercorporeality, it examines how prolonged exposure to organizational rhythms becomes retrospectively sedimented within professional trajectories as embodied experience. More specifically, it explores how participants relate synchronization and desynchronization with organizational rhythms to bodily resonance or dissonance, temporal agency, and the continuity or fragmentation of professional biography. Participant-generated metaphors provide the analytical means through which these extended experiences are condensed and interpreted, while the Romanian IT setting extends this inquiry to an underrepresented organizational and regional context. The four interpretive categories developed from the interviews—Immersion, Gravitation, The Impossible Puzzle, and The Chronophagous Machine—are understood as context-bound configurations through which these relationships become empirically visible, rather than as a general typology of digital work.

2. Lived Space and Time—Organizational Embodiment

Corporeality is increasingly understood as a constitutive dimension of the experience of work in contemporary organizations (Gregg 2011; Shilling 2003; Turner 2008; Wittmann 2014). In this context, the phenomenological concept of lived time is directly relevant because it refers to time as subjective, embodied experience. The body affected by time tends to be discursively marginalized in corporate environments (Shilling 2003). Yet this very invisibilization may make the passage of time more perceptible as a silent, embodied, and deeply subjective dimension of organizational experience (Boncori et al. 2025). Prolonged exposure to corporate demands for efficiency may thus make the passage of time itself experienced as a process of gradual vulnerability (Riach and Kelly 2015; Appannah and Biggs 2015; Biggs et al. 2017; Moulaert and Biggs 2013). For senior employees, the body’s heightened sensitivity to the erosion of privacy, constant artificial light, and other features of the digital workplace may turn sensory experience itself into a series of “points of failure” in the encounter with technology (Riach and Kelly 2015, p. 295). In corporations, aging is experienced as a dissonance in relation to the rhythms of one’s own body, from which one becomes estranged: a body that begins to slow down and be outpaced by technology, a body that betrays (Biggs et al. 2017).

There is a well-known distinction, belonging to Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 2012), between the subjectively lived, pre-reflective body—the sensitive vehicle of being-in-the-world (le corps propre), through which we perceive and act intentionally—and the body-object, viewed as an anatomical, abstractly observable reality (Körper). This distinction makes it possible to approach organizations as intersubjective worlds of embodied practice, in which subjects coexist within a shared organizational space and time, and where material, sensory, normative, and affective conditions shape the lived experience of organizational life (Dale and Burrell 2008; Hancock et al. 2000; Riach and Kelly 2015). Küpers (2015, pp. 48–50) proposes an organizational phenomenology founded on the notion of “historical intercorporeality”, which describes the way we inhabit and understand the world of work spatio-temporally. The lived body (le corps propre) cannot be reduced to the physical-objective body (Körper) subjected to organizational control and self-control. Rather, the organization is experienced over time as an intersubjective environment sustained through bodily resonance. As a knowledge-intensive team activity, the production of specialized knowledge is not only an abstract intellectual activity, but a sensory, intersubjective event made possible by what Küpers (2015) calls embodied empathy: the continuous and increasingly competent reading of nonverbal language makes it possible to intuit the intentions of others and to attune consciously to the rhythm of their inner time. Any desynchronization from the collective rhythm will appear as a rupture in lived intercorporeality, irreducibly historical, and will be interpreted in terms of bodily dissonance.

What becomes part of biography is not abstract clock time, but temporality as experienced through the body and its subjective rhythms. Building on Husserl ([1905] 1991), Merleau-Ponty brings together corporeality, intersubjectivity, and the situated character of temporal experience in the notion of “lived temporality” (Mooney 2022; Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012). The concept makes it possible to interpret organizational time not as a chronological succession quantified by performance indicators (Orlikowski and Yates 2002), but as the way in which the employee feels the organizational rhythm in the practice of everyday experience.

3. Metaphor and Lived Temporality

The hermeneutic phenomenological tradition seeks to reveal our irreducibly subjective way of being-in-the-world, to capture the ontological structure of an experience lived bodily. Language does not merely describe the lifeworld; it is the cognitively privileged medium in which its experience becomes intelligible, the medium in which metaphor emerges as a “form of experiential thinking” (van Manen 1990), through which the meaning of living in time appears as it is given to each of us. It enables the spontaneous articulation of experiences otherwise difficult to express. The thematic analysis of these expressions, in which meaning tends to condense, may reveal our enduring existential positioning toward beings and things, in ever-new situations that are always lived bodily and relationally.

Beyond their rhetorical role or stylistic function, metaphors are conceptual structures ubiquitous in social communication, creatively synthesizing the way we perceive reality and interpret experience (Lakoff and Johnson [1980] 2003), while reflecting culturally contextualized cognitive processes (Kövecses 2010). In this sense, thinking in metaphors is necessary in order to understand and express abstract concepts in terms of immediate experience (Lakoff and Johnson [1980] 2003). They arise spontaneously in the pragmatics of everyday discourse, as a result of the effort to express deep emotions, to interpret complex experiences, and, at the same time, to make them comprehensible to others (Gibbs 2008). Their meaning is defined in the dynamics of conversational negotiation (Cameron 2003), as the speaker attempts to communicate significant lived experiences, in a figurative-abstract manner, in those spatio-temporal terms of natural language born from immediate, concrete, sensory bodily experiences (Kövecses 2010). They become especially visible in explanations, evocative narratives, and evaluations, where complex or deeply personal experiences are organized in the familiar language of everyday life (Semino 2021).

Metaphors contribute to the intersubjective construction of organizational reality and to the ways employees make their own experience coherent in familiar terms (Czarniawska 1997; Morgan 1986; Gibbs 2008; Semino 2021). Organizations as such are understood and described through metaphors that express the way employees interpret their own experience, synthesizing it effectively in those familiar terms in which it has become coherent for them (Morgan 1986).

By compressing the passage of time into coherent images, figurative expressions can capture the particular way in which we anchor ourselves in the organization, the way in which we inhabit its time. In conclusion, metaphor is a powerful epistemological instrument that can reveal the meanings of a temporality lived between the acceleration of objective time, and lived temporality.

4. Methods

4.1. Research Design

Within this broader interpretive perspective, the biographical implications of continuity and social change in organizations have also received increasing attention (Maitlis and Christianson 2014; Bansal et al. 2022). The concern with processes of meaning attribution makes Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith et al. 2009; Smith and Osborn 2008) suitable for exploring how employees emotionally and cognitively experience temporality in IT organizational projects and retrospectively interpret the passage of time. In this sense, the present research, conducted in 2026, had an anamnetic orientation, focusing on participants’ retrospective accounts of their organizational trajectories and professional biographies.

4.2. Participants and Sampling

The sample consisted of ten senior IT professionals from Iași, Romania, an emerging Eastern European technology hub. Participants were selected on the basis of having at least ten years of professional experience, a criterion intended to ensure prolonged exposure to technological cycles, shifts in organizational policy, changes in leadership styles, and related transformations of digital work. This longitudinal accumulation of experience was considered analytically relevant because it increases the likelihood that participants would be able to engage in biographical sense-making and articulate broader existential interpretations of their work trajectories. In this sense, the sampling strategy was based on the assumption that extended professional experience enables individuals to integrate heterogeneous lived experiences into more coherent narratives. In the interview situation, this process often takes the form of discursive condensation, whereby complex experiential histories are organized into conceptual images as participants attempt to render their narratives semantically intelligible and communicable in natural language.

The sample size was considered appropriate to the study’s exploratory, idiographic orientation and to the relatively homogeneous and information-rich participant group. Sample adequacy was grounded in the relevance, specificity, and case-level depth of the interview material rather than statistical breadth, consistent with IPA’s focus on intensive analysis of small, homogeneous samples and with the principle of information power in qualitative interview research (Smith et al. 2009; Malterud et al. 2016). Participants were recruited through organizational gatekeepers using snowball sampling, with eligibility based on predefined criteria. Inclusion required at least ten years of professional experience in IT and the ability to provide a retrospective account of an extended organizational trajectory. The interviews were conducted individually in Romanian, face to face in workplace settings, between 1 January and 28 March 2026, and had a mean duration of 73 min. There was no prior relationship between the researcher and participants. To protect confidentiality, only broad information on age, role, sector, and career transitions was reported; other directly identifying organizational details were omitted from the published extracts.

Table 1. Participant profile.

Participant Code	Gender, Age	Work Experience	Career Trajectory	Most Significant Organizational Change Experienced
P1	Male; 39 years;	14+ years	application developer → technical lead	adoption of Agile work structures in Business Software Implementation
P2	Male; 46 years;	13+ years	software tester → QA manager	transition to distributed and hybrid teams in Software Testing
P3	Female; 45 years;	18+ years	business systems analyst → program manager;	shift from project-based to product-based organization in Digital Banking
P4	Male; 38 years;	14+ years	embedded systems developer → systems architect	cross-functional coordination in Financial Services Security
P5	Female; 42 years;	16+ years	front-end developer → development manager	rapid team and organizational scaling in E-commerce
P6	Male; 39 years;	17+ years	network administrator → cloud platform manager	integration of development and operations teams in Cloud Services
P7	Female; 43 years;	19+ years	database developer → data solutions architect;	integrating previously outsourced teams in Telecommunications
P8	Female; 44 years;	16+ years	interface designer → U X strategy lead	shift toward continuous, cross-functional product development in Digital Services
P9	Male; 49 years;	15+ years	network administrator → cybersecurity architect	expansion of organizational security structures in Financial Services
P10	Male; 37 years	13+ years	application support specialist → program coordinator	internationalization of project coordination in Enterprise Resource Planning

provides a participant-level profile using anonymized codes and reports the biographical and career-context characteristics relevant to the eligibility criteria.

4.3. Interview Procedure

I used a semi-structured Interpretative Phenomenological Interview (IPA), eliciting descriptions as detailed as possible of the way in which the experience of the passage of time is organizationally felt. Respecting the principle of double hermeneutics, I sought to capture, without distortion, the way in which the subjects themselves conceptualize their own experience and give it meaning, thereby positioning themselves ontologically in relation to it (Smith et al. 2009). Starting from the presupposition that metaphor reveals the structure of experience, I treated the narrative discourses as networks of lived meanings, within whose economy metaphors appear naturally as points of convergence that spontaneously connect perceptions, interpretations, and emotions as these have been woven into the participants’ biographies. In these interpretive nodes, the meanings of the evoked experience tend to condense and to articulate themselves with maximum coherence, denoting the subjects’ specific way of relating to it, both cognitively and emotionally.

The interviews were conducted individually in Romanian, audio recorded, and transcribed verbatim. Coding and category development were conducted on the original Romanian transcripts, prior to translation. Quotations selected for publication were translated into English by the author and checked for accuracy against the Romanian originals, with particular attention to imagery, connotation, immediate narrative context, and the preservation of figurative and embodied meanings. The excerpts were subsequently back-translated into Romanian by an independent bilingual researcher to verify semantic equivalence. Participants were encouraged to articulate their experiences through descriptive metaphors and spontaneous analogies. Recurring figurative expressions were subsequently identified and interpreted within each participant’s narrative context, in order to clarify the existential positioning conveyed through them. Their temporal implications were explored inductively, with attention to the ways in which corporeality emerged as a central dimension of the lived experience of organizational time.

The semi-structured interview guide was organized around 6 core thematic domains, with a variable number of open-ended questions (between 2 and 3), depending on the participants’ willingness and capacity to respond, and moved from broad biographical narration to focused reflection on organizational temporality. Participants were invited to recall particular episodes, compare different periods from the perspective of organizational change, and finally clarify the meanings attributed to expressions or images they used.

Table 2. Interview guide: thematic domains and illustrative open-ended questions.

Thematic Domain	Illustrative Open-Ended Question
Professional trajectory	Could you describe your professional journey in IT?
Organizational and personal rhythms	During periods of organizational change, how did your own rhythm align with or diverge from your team’s?
Deadlines, overlapping projects and availability	How have expectations of availability shaped your experience of working time?
Changing pace of work	Looking back across your professional life, how has the pace of work changed?
Figurative articulation of experience	What images or comparisons best capture your working experience in IT?
Long-term biographical meaning	What meaning do the years spent in digital work hold within your life story?

presents one illustrative open-ended question for each thematic domain.

4.4. Analytical Procedure

Analysis proceeded idiographically.

First, each interview account was annotated for descriptions of time experience, personal and organizational rhythm, acceleration, availability, bodily response, temporal agency, and biographical meaning.

Second, initial notes were developed into within-case experiential themes.

Third, participant-generated figurative expressions were captured in their immediate narrative context and linked to the temporal experiences they condensed.

Fourth, patterns of divergence and convergence were compared across cases.

Finally, the themes were organized into four higher-order interpretive categories—Immersion, Gravitation, The Impossible Puzzle, and The Chronophagous Machine—and interpreted in dialogue with the concepts of lived temporality, historical intercorporeality, synchronization and desynchronization. For reasons of transparency, a traceable interpretive sequence from participants’ original wording, to their initial interpretations, experiential themes grounded in the narrative context, and higher-order categories, was carefully maintained. Supported by participant-generated expressions, the categories were developed as analytical constructs through cross-case comparison. Initial coding and within-case theme development were conducted manually and inductively, remaining close to participants’ wording and immediate narrative context. Once recurrent experiential patterns had been identified, phenomenological concepts were introduced at a later interpretive stage as sensitizing concepts rather than a priori coding categories. For example, P6’s statement, “I press the accelerator along with everyone else, but secretly keep the handbrake on,” was initially coded as outward synchronization combined with concealed resistance. This was subsequently developed into the experiential theme of protective self-division/tacit resistance to acceleration and later contributed to the higher-order category The Chronophagous Machine.

Participant language and researcher interpretation were analytically connected, while carefully preserving the distinction between them. Participant-generated metaphors served as empirical points of departure, with their analytical significance developed through attention to narrative context and recurrent patterns across cases.

5. Results

The subjects’ positioning in relation to organizational time was described and analyzed through the concept of historical intercorporeality (Küpers 2015). Recurring metaphors were subsequently grouped in order to clarify, retrospectively, the relationship between organizational rhythms and subjectively lived temporality. The situations discussed below capture these modes of anamnetic positioning. Concepts such as bodily dissonance, alienation, and existential expropriation are used below as higher-order analytical constructs derived from recurrent patterns in participants’ metaphorical accounts, rather than as direct participant self-descriptions.

5.1. Immersion: Lived Temporality Tends to Fuse with Organizational Rhythm

Synchronization is voluntary; the passage of time is retrospectively described as an experience of continuity, in terms of linear progressivity, a repetitive cycle, a temporal loop, or even an ascending spiral.

Organizational rhythms are interpreted as environments for solving welcome challenges, as a source of intellectual excitement, while organizational acceleration becomes an existential remedy for the routine of everyday life. The pressure of instantaneity activates personal energies, facilitating synchronization with the rhythm of the team.

Even when the organization is evoked as a space of routine, one’s own time appears as a resource invested with conviction in work projects, even at the cost of irreversible existential consumption.

The experience of biographical time preserves its continuity and unitary character (

Table 3. Voluntary synchronization, resonance with organizational rhythm, temporal continuity.

Participant-Generated Metaphor	Retrospective Temporal Pattern	Analytical Interpretation
rafting, kayaking	linearity with episodic accelerations (waterfalls)	voluntary involvement in projects; challenges as a source of excitement and professional satisfaction
fitness bicycle	constant cyclicity, self-imposed repetitiveness	assumed routine, lack of a sense of long-term finality
useful burning away	linearity; the boundaries between projects have faded	existential consumption, voluntary physical exhaustion
the edifice	linearity; projects have become integral parts of the architecture of a shared construction	one’s own time as a freely invested resource; the satisfaction of personal construction
the vortex	spiral with constant acceleration	organizational rhythm as a source of intellectual excitement and personal satisfaction
immersion in work	constant linearity	voluntary submersion; professional life as existential therapy, a remedy for routine and the meaninglessness of everyday life

).

Participant language grounds this category in expressions that describe organizational time as a medium entered voluntarily, and sustained through challenge, and existential investment.

P2: “For many years now, I have felt as though I were rafting or kayaking down a rather strange river. At times it flows slowly and peacefully; at others, it resembles a mountain stream full of rapids and waterfalls. Although these sudden bursts of acceleration push me to my limits, I have to admit that I enjoy them—they continue to energize me.”

P7: “It is anonymous work, and it is very easy to lose all sense of proportion, but at least it gives you a sense of purpose. As programmers, we work hard to build invisible structures. Sometimes, keeping things in perspective, of course, I think of the medieval cathedral builders: millions of people have benefited from what they created, but who remembers their names?”

P3: “I always preferred to live in the present. I willingly allow myself to become absorbed in work-related problems, immersing myself in my work and taking refuge in this online parallel world, away from the boredom of everyday life.”

P6: “When I was younger, I enjoyed being caught up in that dizzying, exhilarating daily vortex. It left very little time for family, but now I have to admit that sometimes I feel like saying, ‘Stop the Earth—I want to get off.’”

5.2. Gravitation: Organizational Rhythm Colonizes Lived Temporality

Organizational rhythm governs lived time, which comes to gravitate around the organization. The passage of time is retrospectively described in terms of linear progressivity, or of a temporal loop and tidal rhythm.

The anamnetic positioning reflects bodily dissonance in relation to organizational rhythm. Participants described cumulative vulnerability, organizational acceleration and a growing awareness of bodily limits under organizational acceleration, evoking a sense of premature aging (Riach and Kelly 2015; Biggs et al. 2017). Projects are lived as periods of flow, submersion, and reflux, while professional biography appears retrospectively as an imprisonment within cyclicity. In the constant tension of self-acceleration, the loss of control over one’s own time is analytically associated with alienation from the organization (Rosa 2013, 2019) and self-forgetting.

The experience of biographical time preserves its continuity and unitary character (

Table 4. Involuntary synchronization, resonance/dissonance with organizational rhythm, temporal continuity.

Participant-Generated Metaphor	Retrospective Temporal Pattern	Analytical Interpretation
flow/reflux	cyclical continuity	bodily adaptation (invasion/apnea/withdrawal), episodic dissonance
the bite of the whip	linear continuity with sudden accelerations	reluctant submissiveness, involuntary dissonance
the forced march	linear continuity	conscious self-acceleration, constant tension, involuntary dissonance
the hamster wheel	continuity—temporal loop	imprisonment in cyclicity, self-forgetting, crisis of meaning, teleological dilution (loss of the sense of finality)
premature aging	linear continuity—somatization of organizational rhythm	awareness of the body’s limits in deadline culture, cumulative vulnerability, aged body
the conveyor belt	linear continuity, automation	loss of control over one’s own time, alienation

). The recurrent imagery shifts from voluntary participation to externally imposed cyclicity, automation, and the cumulative bodily strain.

P1: “My life in the company is a constant ebb and flow. I am like a shell lying on the beach: when the water comes in, I feel at ease and return to my family; when it recedes, there is nothing else to do, so I go back to the office and wait for the tide to return.”

P4: “After all these years, I still greatly enjoy what I do, but I have grown old confined to this chair, sitting in front of these screens.”

P10: “I feel useful doing this kind of work, but it has begun to constrain me. I am like a transmission belt running over two drums; then the drums are replaced, and I have to stretch or contract to fit them.”

P9: “My relationship with deadlines changed over time. At first, they helped me mobilize and work more efficiently, but eventually I began to anticipate them like the crack of a whip. I may feel it through the fabric rather than directly on my skin, but I still feel the sting. Don’t get me wrong—perhaps the comparison is too strong, but that is how I would describe it.”

5.3. The Impossible Puzzle: Lived Temporality Falls Out of Step with Organizational Rhythm

Organizational rhythm affects the experience of lived spatio-temporality. The passage of time is retrospectively described in terms of linear progressivity, a temporal loop, or tidal rhythm. Under the implacable pressure of indefinitely extended instantaneity, the boundaries between projects tend to dissolve.

Subjects become involuntarily desynchronized; their own rhythms increasingly fall out of step with organizational rhythms. Their accounts suggest bodily dissonance associated with fragmentation, disorientation, and a loss of coherence in lived time. Subjects experience a sense of temporal mismatch and state that it becomes increasingly difficult for them to remain anchored in the present.

The experience of biographical time loses its continuity and appears as an impossible puzzle, in which the pieces can no longer be fitted together (

Table 5. Involuntary desynchronization, bodily dissonance, temporal fragmentation.

Participant-Generated Metaphor	Retrospective Temporal Pattern	Analytical Interpretation
the insect’s jumps	discontinuity	temporal mismatch, difficulty remaining anchored in the present
losing the thread	discontinuity with temporal fragmentation	disorientation, anxiety, need for re-anchoring, intuitive incoherence
running after the train	discontinuity without fragmentation	sudden acceleration, involuntary lag, inability to resonate any longer
the sprint turned into a marathon	linear continuity	implacable acceleration, indefinite extension of task instantaneity, with the dissolution of boundaries between projects

).

The phrases convey distinct forms of temporal mismatch, connecting acceleration to involuntary lag, and interruption to disorientation and the dissolution of boundaries between projects.

P7: “It is like running for the train every morning: even though you always catch it, for years you have lived with the fear that one day you will not. And this industry is unforgiving…”

P8: “It feels like the experience of a failed Theseus, trapped in the labyrinth without Ariadne’s thread. I once held it firmly, but at some point—I could not say exactly when—it slipped from my grasp.”

P4: “It all comes down to these projects, which keep coming one after another, forcing me to sprint again and again—but over marathon distances…”

P5: “At some point, I felt like a grasshopper leaping through grass so tall that I could no longer see where I would land next—or even quite where I was in time anymore.”

5.4. The Chronophagous Machine: Lived Temporality Breaks Away from Organizational Rhythm

Prolonged bodily dissonance in relation to organizational rhythms affects the experience of lived time most profoundly. Subjects seek to desynchronize voluntarily, attempting to protect their inner duration from the accelerations of organizational rhythm. Through tacit resistance and efforts at self-division, organizational rhythm and lived temporality flow together without interfering. The biographical experience of lived time remains unitary, but appears as a puzzle whose pieces must constantly be fitted together through sustained daily effort.

When, however, the organization is described as a time-eater and a thief of decades, these metaphors are interpreted, on the basis of their recurrent narrative context, as expressing expropriation, existential abuse, and profound alienation. The biographical experience of lived time is correspondingly characterized as radically fragmented (

Table 6. Voluntary desynchronization, bodily dissonance, temporal continuity.

Participant-Generated Metaphor	Retrospective Temporal Pattern	Analytical Interpretation
the time-eater	linear continuity, constancy	existential abuse, resentment, profound alienation from the organization
parallel tracks	linear continuity, constancy	effort of self-division, liminality
the stolen decades	linear continuity, constancy	irreversible expropriation, alienation from the organization
driving with the handbrake on	linear continuity, constancy	tacit resistance to acceleration, adaptation to organizational rhythm

).

Participant formulations articulate the strongest distancing from organizational rhythm, framing work life as an irrecoverable time theft. One must resist through deliberate slowing and self-protection.

P5: “I have come to feel this work in my bones. I can feel it eating away at the time of my life, while the reserves I had in my twenties have dwindled drastically…”

P6: “At some point, I learned to adapt. I press the accelerator along with everyone else, but secretly keep the handbrake on.”

P8: “My private life and my working life are like two railway tracks. Looking back, they seem to have met somewhere at the beginning, but that was only an optical illusion—they have always remained parallel.”

P7: “For years, I lived with the sense that I was building something, even though no one would ever know who I was. Lately, I have begun to wonder whether those were decades I invested or decades that were stolen from me with my own willing participation. Maybe I am simply an incorrigible idealist—someone close to me would probably say I have no practical sense at all.”

The four categories are understood as context-dependent interpretive configurations rather than as generalizable patterns, prevalence estimates, or stable professional identities. Some participants contributed to more than one category, and similar experiences acquired different meanings across different periods of the same professional trajectory. P7, for example, appears in Immersion through the image of cathedral builders, in The Impossible Puzzle through the image of running for a train, and in The Chronophagous Machine through his retrospective uncertainty over whether decades had been invested or “stolen.” Similar tensions emerge within individual accounts: P6 contrasts an earlier enjoyment of the “daily vortex” with a later desire to “get off,” while P9 describes deadlines shifting from a source of mobilization to an anticipated “crack of a whip.” P4 likewise combines continuing enjoyment of work with accumulating bodily strain and appears across both Gravitation and The Impossible Puzzle. This variability and its apparent contradictions were retained to reflect the idiographic complexity of experience, allowing different and sometimes competing meanings to coexist within the same professional biography.

The analytical differences and overlaps among the four context-bound configurations are highlighted in the following table (

Table 7. Comparative analytical profile of the four context-bound categories.

Analytical Dimension	Immersion	Gravitation	The Impossible Puzzle	The Chronophagous Machine
Organizational rhythm	Voluntary synchronization; challenge and acceleration are largely embraced.	Rhythm becomes externally dominant; synchronization is increasingly involuntary.	Organizational rhythm outpaces subjective tempo; involuntary desynchronization predominates.	Protective desynchronization and resistance coexist with experiences of organizational time as appropriative
Temporal agency	Relatively high; time is experienced as willingly invested.	Reduced but not absent; adaptation and self-acceleration remain possible.	Markedly reduced; participants describe lag, disorientation, and difficulty re-anchoring.	Defensive or protective agency through slowing, self-division, or withdrawal; in some accounts agency is experienced as severely diminished.
Embodied experience	Resonance, energization, and accepted fatigue.	Cumulative strain, bodily adaptation, and perceived premature aging.	Bodily dissonance, anxiety, and temporal mismatch.	Prolonged dissonance, exhaustion, and efforts at bodily self-protection.
Biographical continuity	Continuity is preserved and work is integrated into a coherent professional biography.	Continuity is preserved, although lived time becomes increasingly colonized by organizational rhythm.	Continuity becomes discontinuous or fragmented and is experienced as difficult to reconstruct.	Continuity may be maintained only through sustained defensive effort, while some accounts describe radical fragmentation.
Dominant metaphors	Rafting/kayaking; edifice; vortex; immersion.	Flow/reflux; bite of the whip; forced march; hamster wheel; conveyor belt; premature aging.	Insect’s jumps; losing the thread; running for the train; sprint turned into a marathon.	Time-eater; stolen decades; parallel tracks; driving with the handbrake on.

).

6. Discussion

The analytical concepts used in this discussion are framed as interpretive descriptions of retrospective experience rather than as generalized claims about digital work. Against this background, organizational rhythm, understood as a collective practice (Bluedorn and Denhardt 1988; Bluedorn 2002; Orlikowski and Yates 2002; Shipp and Richardson 2021; Karlsen 2023), appears retrospectively woven into the subjects’ biographies through images of immersion, gravitation, an impossible puzzle, or a chronophagous machine. It is interpreted either in terms of resonance and voluntary investment or, conversely, in terms of constraint, disorienting fragmentation of everyday temporal continuity, and even alienating rupture. Evoked as a process of intense negotiation (Orlikowski and Yates 2002; Bluedorn 2002; Karlsen 2023), temporal experience in the organization is phenomenologically articulated through the tension between organizational rhythm and subjective rhythms. Metaphorical expressions render this tension intelligible at the individual level, condensing the relation between work and biography into figures drawn from everyday spatio-temporal experience: “the conveyor belt,” “the hamster wheel,” “the time-eater,” “losing the thread,” and so forth.

The experience of voluntary synchronization and bodily resonance is articulated through metaphors of linear continuity and fluidity, in which organizational rhythm and inner tempo tend to merge into an immersive and anamnetically coherent experience. As the boundaries between projects fade, time spent within the organization is interpreted as continuous accumulation and gradual construction, even when this process entails a form of existential consumption. Even when one’s own time comes to gravitate around the rhythm of the team, subjects do not necessarily experience this as a diminishment of temporal agency. Transformed into an anchor of existential meaning, the past spent in organizations is evoked as a constitutive part of personal biography.

By contrast, when acceleration is experienced as exogenous, constant, and unnatural, the desynchronization between organizational and individual rhythm can be analytically framed as bodily dissonance. The cumulative somatization of its effects is captured through metaphors of existential exhaustion and premature aging. The boundaries between work and private life become so permeable that the biographical past is evoked as a state of prolonged liminality and conceptualized through the cyclical movement of immersion and emersion. Time outside the organization becomes a vital space of recovery, while resistance takes the form of a long-term strategy for preserving one’s own rhythms through deliberate desynchronization from organizational rhythm (Rosa 2019).

The prolonged experience of temporal discontinuity, already associated with temporal overload (Karlsen 2023) and temporal overlap (Bluedorn 2002), affects the coherence of lived time, which appears to the subjects as a puzzle in continuous reconfiguration. Their capacity for time work (Flaherty 2003; Flaherty et al. 2020), understood as the capacity to shape everyday temporal experience through negotiation with imposed rhythms, deadlines, and sequences (Orlikowski and Yates 2002), is considerably weakened. In this sense, the perception of the organization as an agent that colonizes one’s own time indicates a dramatic diminishment of temporal agency, while the metaphor of the chronophagous machine is interpreted within its narrative context as expressing alienation, with the organization thereby framed as an expropriator and a consumer of the lived body.

These findings should also be considered in relation to the composition of the sample and the broader historical context in which participants’ careers developed. Participants were 37–49 years old and had at least 13 years of professional experience, with several having moved from technical positions into lead, managerial, architectural, or coordination roles. Experiences of exhaustion, reduced temporal control, or perceived premature aging may therefore intersect with career stage, organizational seniority, age, and changing professional responsibilities, rather than reflecting characteristics of digitally mediated work alone. Their early careers also unfolded during a period of substantial transformation in the Romanian labour market and the rapid development of the domestic IT sector (Voicu 2005; Manelici and Pantea 2021; Pantea 2025). Economic uncertainty, more limited employment opportunities, and the changing value attached to occupational stability may consequently have formed part of the background against which participants retrospectively understood their professional trajectories, although these influences were not examined directly in the present study.

7. Conclusions

In conclusion, organizational rhythm is lived as an experience of synchronization or desynchronization, with ambivalent, mobilizing, or alienating consequences. It becomes both the ground and the horizon of an existential negotiation unfolding between acceleration and temporal anchoring. Organizational life thus emerges as a spatiotemporal texture stretched between the continuous pressure of the present, the anticipatory demands of the future, and the retrospective consolidation of a professional identity sedimented through sustained effort and embodied fatigue.

More specifically, the findings connect the lived experience of time to characteristic conditions of digital work: persistent connectivity, compressed project cycles, recurrent interruption, overlapping tasks, and expectations of availability. Across the participants’ retrospective accounts, these conditions were organized into four context-bound relations to organizational rhythm: voluntary synchronization, involuntary gravitation, desynchronizing fragmentation, and protective withdrawal. Rather than constituting a general model of IT work, these patterns offer an exploratory account of how prolonged exposure to digital work may become integrated into professional biography, affecting temporal agency, and bodily self-understanding.

8. Limitations and Future Research

These interpretations are offered as context-bound, idiographic readings in which emotionally charged terms such as bodily dissonance, alienation, or existential expropriation designate interpretive patterns condensed in participants’ language, while several limitations delimit the scope and interpretative reach of the findings.

First, the sample comprises ten senior professionals from a single Romanian technology hub and cannot represent the diversity of occupations, organizations, career stages, or regional contexts within digital work. Family and caregiving circumstances may also have shaped experiences of temporal pressure and work–life boundaries, but were not examined systematically. In the absence of comparative data, the study cannot determine which patterns are specific to Iași; its contribution is therefore limited to documenting these experiences within an underrepresented Eastern European technology context.

Second, the retrospective biographical design may also privilege salient episodes and shape the narrative reconstruction of past experiences from the standpoint of the present (Rosenthal 1993; Riessman 2008).

Future research could compare different technology hubs, follow professionals longitudinally, and combine biographical interviews with diaries to capture how organizational temporality changes as new technologies and work arrangements emerge.