Organizing time: Internationalization narratives of executive managers

We study the narratives of executive managers of internationalizing firms to understand their organization of time in the internationalization process. While most of the international business literature has studied internationalization processes in terms of objective ‘clock time’, we seek to understand how managers perceive and construct time in a subjective sense. In addition to Butler's (1995) four conceptions of time, we identify possibly two more in the narratives of executive managers of firms that are associated with their accelerated internationalization. Also, use of the concept association software Leximancer enables a novel approach at unravelling narrative understandings in which executives from smaller firms associate time with a myriad of activities in the internationalization process, while the time concept is stable and relatively independent of these activities for executives in larger firms that are internationalizing.