Patience and Organization Studies: Festina lente

Modern organizations often valorize speed and immediacy, treating acceleration as the dominant temporal logic of organizational life. Challenging this logic remains difficult, however, because organization studies lacks a well-developed conceptual language for alternative ways of engaging with time. We propose patience as one such alternative. Building on recent work on Eigenzeit, we argue that organizations can partially uncouple from external temporal pressures and develop forms of relative temporal autonomy that enable the orchestration of differentiated temporalities. While Eigenzeit highlights how organizations establish and sustain a temporality of their own amid complex temporal demands, less attention has been paid to the pacing through which this temporality is enacted in everyday organizational life. We therefore foreground pacing as the practical means by which organizations enact and sustain their own temporality. Within this context, patience emerges as a particular mode of pacing grounded in purposeful deceleration. To make this mode of pacing analytically visible, we identify four manifestations of organizational patience: waiting, restraining, forbearing, and persisting. Drawing on insights from the sociology of time, organization studies, and philosophy, we show how these manifestations represent distinct ways of pacing organizational activities by holding time open, delaying intervention, staying with difficulty, and sustaining engagement over time. By reframing patience as a distinctive mode of pacing rather than passive inactivity, we show how organizations cultivate and sustain an Eigenzeit through practices that contribute to the orchestration of competing temporal demands. This perspective advances organization studies by illuminating how temporal orchestration is accomplished through everyday organizational interactions and how patience enables organizations to sustain resilience and meaningful engagement in the face of acceleration pressures.