Time to ride : time as central to the creation and maintenance of shaded organizations

This study takes a grounded theory approach and examines how time takes on constitutive qualities in a mildly hidden organization or what Scott (2013) categorizes as a shaded organization. The organization is a voluntary recreational cycling group, the Thursday Night Social Ride, lacks clearly identifiable leadership and readily available textual elements. 19 participants of the Thursday Night Social Ride were interviewed for this study. The themes that emerged from the data were time, level of hiddenness of the organization, and the relationship among organizational identification, time and hiddenness. This study proposes that in shaded organizations one of the four flows of CCO, activity coordination or time, plays a larger role in creating and maintaining organization while simultaneously acting as an anchor with which members identify.