This abstract aims to address research challenges related to time and competing rationalities of time management within welfare institutions participating in partnerships to develop or renew welfare work. Our objective is to present a critical analysis of time dynamics when forming participatory partnerships to develop welfare institutions and to discuss how difficulties to claim and uphold time for experimental developments of welfare work affects outcome.

Experiences and knowledge build up in two long-term action research project conducted as participatory partnerships forms our point of departure. The first project, ‘the school project’, was a two year long partnership among management, teachers and pedagogues at a medium size Danish school, that aimed to examine and empower cross-disciplinary aspirations to advance inclusive education (Madsen, Bladt & Tofteng 2016). The second project, ‘the pre-school project’ was a three year long partnership among pedagogical employees, management and children at five Danish preschools, that aimed to examine and develop everyday life and learning environments in preschool (Husted 2016). The projects shared the same goals and ambitions; to develop and qualify pedagogical work by putting forward the knowledge, critique and dreams of the professionals (here teachers and pedagogues) through specially designed participatory processes and experiments. The projects was characterised by high degree of commitment and cooperation among leaders and employees at the participating institutions. This meant that the institutions at hand had allocated time, space and attention into employee driven developmental and experimental processes leading to new proposals and solutions to problems or difficulties in the pedagogical settings or learning environments. However, the claim for time and commitment to open ended experiments proved to be difficult to uphold. Whenever a hesitant outline for a new procedure or practice emerged, it was likely that the participants would quickly decide to do the outline, convert it into a new standard or reject the whole idea. At the same time, the participants repeatedly requested scheduled free time from other scheduled operational tasks in order to take serious the experimental dimensions of developing pedagogical practice and sustain new developments. Contemporary difficulties to incorporate development organization in day-to-day operations in institutions and companies and the importance of time and commitment to open ended developments and learning forms a familiar challenge in action research (Pålshaugen 1998, Argyris & Schön 1996). However, the challenges in these two projects did not only touch upon time and time consumption but also upon rationalities linked to the use of linear time. Acquisition of self-regulated time showed to be a focal point for conflicting dynamics between the anticipations tied to experimental developments and the anticipations linked to day-to-day operations in the institutions. Anticipations tied to experimental developments of work stresses ongoing and reversible tests of a better practice and hold a circular, tentative and investigative understanding of how to attain learning and change (Lewin 1948, Sennett 2008). Thus, acceleration of social change and the increasingly influence of performance indicators (Scott 2014) seem to impose very short time span and very little patience with experimental trials on the participants in the two projects. Anticipations and pace tied to day-to-day operations within welfare institutions doesn’t really seem to have time for experimental time and the unpredictable qualities that might be extracted from these experiments.

In this sense the study puts forward and re-actualize the discussions on whether man’s possibilities of creating a free and more satisfactory work, society and life  require setting time free from work (Gorz 1999) or setting time free within work (Negt 1984).  

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