Article
Time and temporality
in online corporate
pictorials
Hans Ra
¨
mo
¨
Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University,
Sweden
Abstract
Many different social contexts are embedded in, and mediated by, visual prac-
tices, so too in corporate communication. The specific aim of this paper is to
use the concept of scopic regimes as a means of understanding pictorial rep-
resentations of time and temporality in online corporate communication. It is
argued in this paper that the temporal reference has changed direction, from
pointing backward to forward. What has been a matter of predominantly por-
traying important corporate achievements to posterity has increasingly become
a matter of appearing for impatient online viewers today as responsible for the
future. Three illustrative examples of time and temporality in online corporate
pictorials are included and discussed, representing movement, moment, and the
allegory of time.
Keywords
Corporate communication, pictorials, responsibility, scopic regimes,
temporality, time
Setting the stage
For most people, seeing is the dominant sense, what we see and how we
comprehend the visual information is influenced by our expectations and
the feelings these evoke in us. The focus of the interest in a media-saturated
culture is in the extent to, as well as the manner, in which different forms of
social and cultural practices are structured or shaped by images and how
these images are seen and perceived. The perception of time and temporality
Time & Society
0(0) 1–24
! The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0961463X15587832
tas.sagepub.com
Corresponding author:
Hans Ra
¨
mo
¨
, Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University, S-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden.
Email: hra@sbs.su.se
at Stockholm University Library on June 17, 2015tas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
(past, present, future) is also affected by what is seen, and how it is seen is
reflected through personal experiences and how these relate to what is
looked at. The recent proliferation of online pictorials has particularly
influenced the perception of time and temporality, not only in terms of
increased speed and quantity but also in terms of recollection of time.
By the term pictorial is here meant photographs of some thing or some
situation with attached captions, which is intended to illustrate and empha-
size whatever message is to be conveyed. Some of these pictorials have
recurrent time-related motifs, particularly when included in themes and
messages that are forward-looking and visionary. However, to separate
and demarcate forms and sources of media from one another is hardly
possible as all ‘‘media are mixed in different ways’’ and there is always a
‘‘problematic gap’’ between image and text (Ellestro
¨
m, 2010: 24; McLuhan,
1964/1994; Mitchell, 1994: 89). One example of such multimodality is
corporate communications that were traditionally confined to print and
broadcast but are increasingly integrated into dynamic online settings,
with text and figures, charts and tables, as well as images and video clips.
Dynamic online and real-time information frequently include pictorial
depictions that carry the restless viewer and observer forward. For instance,
over the past 10 to 15 years, CCTV has become ubiquitous as a (panoptical)
source of real-time surveillance information—and not just only on city
streets but also in factories, offices, and warehouses (Norris, 2012). The
focus on the instantaneous is also evident in Instagram’s social networking
service spreading the (rhopographic) visualizations of ‘‘now.’’ The spreading
of online pictorial information has therefore influenced our approach to
accessibility, but also the quest for what is new right now.
The ‘‘lure of the new’’ involves the mesmerizing ‘‘deconstruction of the
old’’ (De Cock and Rehn, 2006: 123), and with ‘‘neophilia, the new is
something to be loved, worshipped, and adored for its own sake’’
(Rhodes and Pullen, 2010: 2). The ‘‘obsession with the present-mindedness’’
(Innis, 1951: 76) also challenges the efforts to preserve digital narratives
(Pietrzyk, 2012). Innis (1951) described the structural capacities of media
to be biased towards either time or space where time-biased information is
characterized as traditional, ceremonial and geographically confined (e.g.,
stone carvings) and space-biased information is less durable (e.g., paper)
but easy to transport and ‘‘secular, present-minded’’ (Babe, 2004: 284,
quoted in Pietrzyk, 2012: 128). Following from this, means that pictorial
online information is space-biased and particularly ephemeral in terms of
duration.
Availability at an instant has in many ways become the measure. Harvey
(1990) first articulated the concept of time–space compression, which occurs
as a result of technological innovations that condense or elide spatial and
2 Time & Society 0(0)
at Stockholm University Library on June 17, 2015tas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
temporal distances. Virilio’s (1991) treatise on dromology and time com-
pression indicates that higher speed always strikes slower speed, which leads
to a ‘‘society intensely present here and there at once—in other words
telepresent to the whole world’’(Bartram, 2004: 293; Virilio, 1997: 25).
Bartram (2004), using Virilio’s concept of dromology, finds therefore that
time compression creates new and detrimental forms of occulacentrism
(privileging of vision) as it undermines time for deliberation. Similarly,
authors such as Massey (1994), Nowotny (1994), Castells (1996), and
Urry (2000) have discussed how a temporal regime characterized by com-
pressed and accelerated time has affected late modern societies. Urry (2000),
for instance, uses the concept of instantaneous time to capture the new time
regime where temporal separation of cause and effect is replaced by frag-
mented presence of ‘‘nows.’’ More recently, and perhaps more trivially,
media theorist Douglas Rushkoff (2013: 7,8) says that the ‘‘present
shock’’—playing on the title of Alvin Toffler’s 1970 ‘‘future shock’’—is a
real-time, always-on existence without past or a future, origins or goals; to
living in a world where everything is happening now. The constant flow of
pictorial online corporate communications is certainly an expression of such
desire for the immediate.
Various forms of dynamic online depictions affect the perception of time
and temporality. When ‘‘all’’ information is increasingly expected to be
available at the time, also means that information related to temporal
change and serial order (i.e., past, present, future) ‘‘should be’’ immediately
available; what is seen now is what counts, and what is seen are increasingly
pictorials passing by. There is of course a fascination with ‘‘seeing’’ what is
happening ‘‘right now,’’ but it is susceptible to errors and corruption. This
applies, of course, to any information source. However, the difference is
that the increasing focus on ephemeral depictions reduces the ability to put
it into context and to evaluate afterwards. Pictorials of currently unfolding
events can have roots going back decades, and the full story is not available
without closer involvement.
Pictorials play an increasingly powerful role in how fluid and
fast-moving online corporate communication is perceived by internal and
external audiences to provide attractive and supposedly convincing presen-
tations. Consequently, the continuous flux of opinionated pictorials affects
the perception of, for example, the way corporations communicate.
Nowadays, corporations act and react with regular online updates about
their performance rather than just making quarterly disclosures, and this
communication is increasingly image based (Argenti, 2006; Goodman and
Hirsh, 2010). Not only a commonplace observation—that the flow of online
pictorials is constantly increasing—but also that this flow of corporate pic-
torials affects the understanding of the past, the present, and the future
Ra¨mo¨ 3
at Stockholm University Library on June 17, 2015tas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
(i.e., temporality). The increase in information that is instantaneously avail-
able online creates a demand for immediacy of content, with signs of what is
to come rather than what has been.
There has been a shift of focus in corporate communications from pre-
dominantly printed material of the past (years’ achievement) to online pic-
torials helping to provide instantaneous but short-lived promises of the
future. The proliferation of online pictorials in corporate communication
de-emphasizes the way things have been—say, the past year’s perform-
ance—and instead exposes the possibilities that lies within each present
moment (looking now), and above all future potentials (looking forward).
Thus, the transience of online information disrupts the sense of continuity
and trustworthiness that comes from documenting past achievements
(cf. the German concept of Musealiserung in Bo
¨
hne, 2005, 2007; Lu
¨
bbe,
1990; Pazzini, 1989). Instead, optimistic overtones of the present future
‘‘imagined, planned, projected, and produced in and for the present’’ will
soon be overridden by new promises for the future (Adam and Groves,
2007: 28; cf. Luhmann, 1976: 142). Particularly, online corporate account-
ing reporting has led to a proliferation of optimistic and forward-looking
pictorials, not least in sustainability communication. Recently in corporate
accounting, studies of rhetoric and photographs in accounting and report-
ing materials have been addressed by, for example, Davison (2007a, 2007b,
2009a, 2009b, 2014). Breitbarth et al. (2010) and Ra
¨
mo
¨
(2011) have studied
the use of photographs in sustainability reporting but without specifically
focusing on the temporal aspects. Visual aspects of organizations have also
been studied by, for example, Linstead and Ho
¨
pfl (2000), Ray and Smith
(2012), Strati (1997), Styhre (2009, 2010), to mention only a few (for an
introductory overview, see also the International Network for Visual
Studies in Organization: http://in-visio.org/) Nonetheless, Bell and
Davison (2013) and Meyer et al. (2013) have highlighted the need for
even more research into the visual dimension of organizations—and studies
of temporal aspects of visuals are notably absent.
How the visual is socialized in visual culture, and particularly what this
mean for the understanding of time and temporality, might seem to be a
rather redundant statement. The focus on the present, and present-mind-
edness that treats history as representative of current concerns, is hardly a
new finding. But a closer inspection unfolds a shift in how temporality is
presented in image-rich corporate communications; from backward to for-
ward orientation. It is therefore argued in this paper that what used to be a
matter of predominantly portraying important corporate achievements
to posterity has increasingly become a matter of appearing for online view-
ers today as responsible for the future. There is a need, therefore, for
greater attention to the temporal underpinning of online corporate
4 Time & Society 0(0)
at Stockholm University Library on June 17, 2015tas.sagepub.comDownloaded from
communications, for example, when persuasive pictorials about the future
are presented to today’s audiences.
Consequently, by focusing on the increasingly pictorial online content in
corporate communication, the specific aim of this paper is to use the con-
cept of scopic regimes as a means of studying how online pictorials shape
and affect the understanding of time and temporal relations.
How, then, to study this large and ever-expanding body of visual cor-
porate communication? Recently, it has become rather common to tackle
historical questions of visual culture in terms of ‘‘scopic regimes.’’ The term
was first introduced by the French film critic Christian Metz and is used in
opposition to the notion that ‘‘vision’’ is universal (Metz, 1981; see also
Feldman, 1997, 2005; Jay, 1988, 1993). For Jay (1993: 69), ‘‘the vigorous
privileging of vision’’ accompanied by technical advances marked the dawn-
ing of the modern era. This ocularcentrism, as a tendency towards visual
metaphors, models, concepts, and priorities within cultural, scientific, and
political discourse, is still a dominating form of creating and directing
meaning, albeit in interaction with other parts of the cognitive system.
By foregrounding the notion of scopic regime emphasizes that ways of
seeing are not natural but constructed and contextual. Scopic regimes thus
become a matter of framing the visual and creating visible and invisible
regimes at which the socialization of vision becomes important. What mes-
sage the scopic regime is foregrounding is further intensified by the inter-
action between image and text in, for example, corporate online pictorials.
This socialization is a network of cultural meanings generated from various
discourses that shape the social practices of vision. It is thus acknowledged
that visuality is deeply implicated in contemporary culture and society,
which also has consequences for the understanding of time and temporality.
The proliferation of pictorials made possible by the development of
online channels has increased the importance attributed to the value of
visibility in contemporary culture. Feldman (2005: 224), for example,
argues that scopic regimes ‘‘prescribe modes of seeing and object visibility
and that proscribe or render untenable other modes and objects of percep-
tion.’’ Gregory (2003: 224) says in a similar way that the idea of a systematic
structuring of the visual field produces a ‘‘constructed visibility that allows
particular objects to be seen in determinate ways.’’ From this follow that
some aspects stand out and catch the attention while others remain hidden
or less visible. In terms of online pictorials, it does not only means that
temporal references are discernible but also that the online format itself
plays an important role in establishing temporal relationships and
recollection.
Therefore, in this study of online corporate communication, scopic
regimes are understood as a repertoire of readily recognizable cues at
Ra¨mo¨ 5
at Stockholm University Library on June 17, 2015tas.sagepub.comDownloaded from