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

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.