Given the critical importance and inescapability of time and timing in human affairs in general and in the lives of organizations in particular, it is ironic that a large part of management scholarship in the field's journals tends to exclude time. By recognizing the centrality of time, process concep- tualizations offer an essential contribution to organ- ization and management knowledge that is not available from most variance-based generaliza- tions. This is because the latter tend to ignore time, reduce it to a lag effect, compress it into variables (e.g., describing decision making as fast or slow, or environments as dynamic or stable), or reduce its role to what Pettigrew, Woodman, and Cameron (2001: 697) called "comparative statics" (reevaluating variance-based relationships at suc- cessive times).