Organizations are confronted with many pressing issues in their environment. Yet, there is great variation in how they experience the urgency to act on these issues, which remains unexplained. Accordingly, we examine how organizations perceive and construct this temporal urgency, drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s theory on time to do so. We argue that their idiosyncratic, subjective construction of urgency to respond to a particular issue results from the interplay between the sequencing of an issue’s events over time (i.e., the issue’s objective temporal structure) and the process by which organizations create and use temporal structures to organize and manage their activities (i.e., the organization’s internal temporal structuring). In terms of the latter, we highlight the critical roles of three aspects: the organization’s perception of how the effectiveness of its potential responses to the respective issues will decrease over time (i.e., the potential responses to the perceived temporal complexity of the issue); the temporal allocation of the organization’s other activities; and the synchronization of the structuring of its actions toward issues with that of other organizations (i.e., temporal coupling). These findings have important implications for the literature on time and temporality and for organizations such as businesses, non-profit firms, and states.
