« Our relationship with time is going through a drastic change » (1). This remark, which has been on my mind for some time, has been echoed by the explanations provided notably by Gilles Finchelstein ‘s essay La Dictature de l’urgence (2). IT HUB FOR H.E.S. will devote a file to the theme of urgency and will mainly draw on this author’s cogent arguments. Several frames of interpretations are put forward by this essay writer. The first part of his analysis will be presented this week and will focus on hard facts. First and foremost, a technical reading points to the ever quicker response-times and higher performance of the ICTs that have spread to the four corners of the world. Added to this is the political and economic dimension of the issue. Economic liberalism has drawn its current strength on the new technologies that compress time, expand the markets, thereby heightening competition and creating a sense of urgency.

The acceleration of time which started to be felt with the emergence of technology in the mid XVIIIth century (3) has lately reached an apex with the advent of the ICTs. Urgency is the hallmark of the digital world where the technical developments have been threefold: digitization, first, with data compression in machines whose memory capacity follows an exponentially increasing rate, second, even quicker data transmission through higher bandwidth and, third, ever increasing computing power. Moore’s law sums up a major driving force in technological change with chip performance doubling every 18 months, even until recently. What about the ICT penetration rate? It is staggering. Virtually 8 households in 10 had internet access within the EU in 2013 against 60% in 2008. 75% of all the European households had high bandwidth connection in 2013 against 48% in 2008. To finish, 43% of all the individuals, within the EU, have currently availed themselves of web-enabled handheld devices (4). A Cisco report stresses that, all in all, the number of laptops, tablets and smartphones was to outnumber humans in 2013, worldwide, with a marked development in Asia, notably in China, the Pacific and Africa, in countries where internet connection is chifly provided by smartphones (5).

Urgency is related to politics and liberalism too. In this respect, the 1980’s were a watershed, with the Reagan-Thatcher years and the increasing opening up of China to the market economy. To take up Deng Xiaoping’s words « it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it is a good cat ». 1989 also witnessed the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. The market has sped up since then and extended to former communist countries, which has tightened competition even further (6). The globalization of the world supports the political interpretation of the phenomenon of urgency. Thomas Friedman sheds some light on it (7). Formerly, states waged war on each other, then corporations fought with each other, now workers are set against each other, within and outside their countries. For example, the strength of the tertiary sector in the US relies on the Indian white collars to carry through the assignments left off by their American counterparts after office hours (research, drafting of contracts, preparation of slideshows etc.). Globalization offers a huge pool of labour to draw on, that passed from from 1,5 billion to 3 billion (8). Where time is compressed, space is impacted too. No swath of land is isolated any more, no territories are landlocked, creating mobility, dynamism and a sense of urgency.

Moreover, the globalization of finance has taken precedence over other forms of globalization. Urgency is related to the vast flows of information that constantly irrigate world markets. Investors look for the slightest information – be it financial, economic, political or personal – that can sway share values. On the legal plan, change in legislation or accounting standards brings about an information glut. Shareholders and investors now ask for more frequent balance sheets than in the past, which no longer come out annually but half-yearly or even on a quaterly basis.

Urgency has prevailed in the realm of finance which has experienced a frantic pace in transactions since the advent of networking. The latter has given birth to an uninterrupted market where time keeps shrinking. According to the statistics issued by the NYSE, shareownership lasted five years on this market in 1970, against three years in 1980 and since 2000 it has spanned a one-year period, with share transfer getting increasingly swifter. Furthermore, capital mobility has been on the rise on market places even if various stock markets have emerged and specialised across the world. They operate round the clock, with real-time quotes and follow the sun from east to west. Asian stock markets are operational before those of Europe which precede the opening of the stock markets in the United States. There even exists a grey market, whose principle lies in the fact that, even when a market is closed, the quotes can be anticipated prior to the opening of the market place. By the same token, the market has become so huge that companies have gradually steered away from banking institutions, to the profit of markets: a phenomenon described as disintermediation that has gained momentum over the last two decades.The sheer volume of financial products – real or virtual – has soared. A case in point is carbon quotas: to stem the greenhouse effect and CO2 emissions, selling carbon quotas was originally set up before the very enforcement of the regulations. The market players have become more and more numerous too. Banks work on behalf of their clients but also for their own interest on market places.

Another aspect is risk, which is part and parcel of urgency. Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, is reported as saying that his is a corporation where too many things are done too quickly (9) The anecdote is recalled by Jeff Darvis after Larry Page cleared Shery Sandberg, his marketing manager, who had caused the loss of millions of dollars as a result of a last gasp decision. This episode is telltale and shows up the uncertainties that companies have to come to terms with. Making pots of money may imply losing money through risk-taking. Andy Grove, Intel’s cofounder claimed in the early 2000’s that corporations would soon fall into two categories: « The quick and the dead », meaning that reactive and proactive companies would outrun all the others (10). Another example, commodities can be bought with hardly any outlay, so to speak, through the leverage effect based on indebtedness ranging to 99% of the transaction. Equities that have not been acquired yet can be sold through «derivatives», financial risk management tools , one feature of which is the postponement of the settlement (11). These financial companies, whose profits used to rise approximately to 10% of all the corporate profits in 1980 to surge to 41% in 2007, have not ceased to grow in the economy since then.

For a few decades, a financial bias has prevailed over the industrial rationale, which was common standard before. Markets have set the tone. Since markets have been able to rake in a lot of money, then corporations have had to follow suit. A 10 to 15% profitability rate can be expected on capital investment against merely a few percentage points in the traditional economy. The upshot of all this is that the relevance of any investment is now gauged purely on the basis of short-term profitability.

Urgency has also affected production cycles. Let’s take the case of the automotive industry where production cycles have dwindled, from the design stage to the manufacturing one and to the roll-out. In 2010, 24 months was the mean production time at Toyota, with a shift from a yearly to a monthly index. Tata, the Indian automobile maker, has developed the New Sedan Indigo, within 20 months. Nissan intends to unveil at least 10 new models every year. The corollary of new production cycles has been novel production methods, along with the design of a raft of new concepts. This is the era of the just-in-time strategy which relies on lean manufactoring processes and other techniques. « KANBAN » is « a Japanese manufacturing system in which the supply of components is regulated through the use of an instruction card sent along the production line » (12) so that the materials must reach each work station neither too soon nor too late. POKA-YOKE is considered an all-cure remedy in firms too. (5/13) « SMED »aka « single minute exchange of die » deals with minimizing the time wasted   when changing over from one product to another, one size to another, one service category to another. «TAKT TIME» is the accurate calculation of the pace at which each unit is to leave the company’s manufacturing process so that production cycle times match the customer demand rate. The « U CELL » consists in eliminating any unnecessary movement by rearranging the company’s layout.

Saving time is uppermost on the agenda. As Gilles Finchelstein puts it, with taylorism, time was the yardstick by which the value of a product was measured (14), while with toyotism, the manufacturing time no longer allows the calculation of a commodity value. » In turn, the work organization is impacted by this new relationship with this concept. The firm « has substituted sequencing for simultaneity, labour division for fuzzy structures and the bureaucratic handover of files for immediate collaboration. »(15) Morever, urgency generates a « deferred effect » in so far as the lessons of the present cannot be drawn to serve the preparation of the future, as underlined by Michel Gollac (16). These observations are concomitant with the advent of the ICTs. Far from being narrowed down to the use of the Internet and its related applications (i.e. emails), or the mobile, the ICTs provide collaborative, management, training and assistant tools capable of reshaping the corporate organization across the board. Being no more the master of one’s time is a pervasive impression in one’s professional life. The use of the mobile designed to make everyone reachable any time, anywhere, and the flood of e-mails have contributed to the phenomenon of fragmented time. They force salaried people to immediately live up to the expectations of those higher up, of clients and suppliers. A polychronous time has been ushered in as professional and personal time overlap (17). You take up a corporate assignment at home or carry out two tasks simultaneously, while replying to an e-mail during a meeting for instance. Multitasking is currently the rule.

None of these readings, taken individually, can help us understand the upheavals which we are going through. Adding them up will not be any more satisfactory either: the internet, the market and money are together part of a system, thus compounding the phenomenon, stepping it up and multiplying its consequences. In the following article, the impact of time compression on our personal lives will be put in perspective.

(1) As Nicole Aubert puts it in Le Culte de l’urgence, Flammarion, coll. « Champs essais », 2010, p. 21.

(2) Gilles Finchelstein, La dictature de l’urgence, Fayard, 2011.

(3) Ibid. p. 104.

(4) www.observatoire-du-numérique.fr, chiffres clés 2013.

(5)www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/07

(6) Gilles Finchelstein, La dictature de l’urgence, op. cit. p.23.

(7) Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat, 2006.

(8) Richard Freeman, The Great Doubling, The Challenge of the New Global Labor Market, Georgia State University, 2004.

(9) Gilles Finchelstein, ibid.

(10) Ibid. p.103.

(11) Derivatives are tradable financial products «whose value depends on the value of some other asset or combination of assets » Encarta Concise English Dictionary , Bloomsbury, London, 2001, p.

(12)) Definition of the online dictionary www.oxforddictionaries.com

(13) « A Japanese approach to « mistake proofing » in all aspects of manufacturing, customer service, procurement etc. It employs visual signals that make mistakes clearly stand out from the rest, or devices that stop an assembly line or process if a part or step is missed. » from the online Business dictionary.

The short videos on www.youtube.com are worth watching too.

(14) Gilles Finchelstein, ibid. p. 67.

(15) François Dupuy, La Fatigue des élites. Le capitalisme et ses cadres, Seuil, coll. « La République des idées », 2005, p. 12.

(16) Michel Gollac, « L’intensité du travail », Revue Economique, vol. 56, n°2, mars 2005, p. 198.

(17) For the definition of polychronicity and monochronicity see Edward T. Hall, The silent language, 1959.

Harley Hahn’s « Time sense: polychronicity and monochronicity », www.harley.com/writing .