Under pressure of time, as Luhmann shows, shifts of preference occur in the long term within organizations, in favour of what is scheduled and restricted, i.e. the selection of factual arrangements and value judgements ultimately changes in accordance with the establishment of temporal priorities. The pressure of time facilitates the 'institutionalization of opportunist pursuit of values'. This means that, in a social system which has attained a high degree of complexity and variability in the achievement of values, it becomes useful to break up conflicts of values - say between such different values as life, hygiene, entertainment, peace, culture, freedom or provision for old age - into a temporal succession. This robs them of something of the antagonistic harshness of a struggle for survival. A decision is then needed only about immediate priorities; the adherents of other values are not discredited, they just have to – wait. Time can also be saved through trust and routine, and through artificially set deadlines otherwise impeded tasks can be raised into the protective zone of the urgent and restricted.3 Managers who work in organizations which set deadlines for them, and who are expected to set deadlines for others, attempt for their part to cope with the chronic lack of time. Every hour in the appointments diary is organized by secretaries or assistants, whose task it is to negotiate, buy and sell their boss's time. All agreements reached are ultimately - finely coordinated with the hierarchy of the status system – only tentative. If new priorities arise, the appointments have to be altered, postponed, rescheduled. It is as if time would do anything to escape the straitjacket which is to be put on it.⁴
The higher the status hierarchy, the more tentative the commitments become, for only the time of subordinates can be firmly determined in advance and assigned. The managers themselves suffer from chronic lack of time and constantly try to do too much. By means of all sorts of tricks, they intensify and delegate, they use even faster means of communication and attend to even more jobs at the same time, in order to gain time in this way. But ultimately even their – long – working day remains limited. The abundance of what still remains to be done, and the possibilities which cannot be realized, far exceed what can be fitted in, however well their time is organized.
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The Longing for the Moment