Abstract
Temporality regimes have importance as underlying sociocultural framework primarily contributing to the socioeconomic base of a business venture, encouraging/enabling particular practices and social relations (e.g., “moving fast”, “scaling”, “growing”), and casting or recasting people`s experience of time. Theories about fast and mobile capitalism are rarely informed by how time, conceived as social and political entity, is put in practice in specific social settings.
The present paper reports the results of a study that took new business ventures growth as exemplary locus arraying contemporary social and political determinations of time uses and temporal practices, and focusing on chronopolitics implications, namely on how actors experience temporality regimes as infrastructural base of employment relations. Analytical work is based on a 12-month ethnographic study carried out in one of the most successful start-up ventures operating in Portugal. Results suggest that speeding-up involve a plurality of partly conflicting implications, and such conflicts invoke tensions that actors live out in their daily activities.
Three relational attributes are discussed as speeding-up implications, in an employment relations perspective: the prevalence of a short-termed task focus, emerging speed as a reassuring proxy for success and accomplishment, in a context marked by densified temporal experiences; low levels of trust and institutionalised reciprocity; short-lived social relations and conflict deprioritisation. These implications are discussed as means to better understand chronopolitics and time uses impact in the expanding literature on contemporary economic action in twenty-first century welfare capitalism.