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Commentary:
= The original abstract for this presentation described a study the role of semiotic artifacts in website design as part of a case-study of organizational re-structuring. What I will actually be presenting is part of the theoretical underpinning of that study: a more general examination of issues of the separability and integrability of analyses of social processes on different time scales (heterochrony).
= I will consider first the potential usefulness of a focus on the characteristic times of activities and actions
= then how and why time-scales are normally separable in material dynamical systems
= and how some phenemena, especially the role of semiotic artifacts in human-infested, meaning-pervaded eco-social-semiotic systems or actant-networks, lead to a need to consider multiple time-scales simultaneously
= finally I will consider ways in which the inclusion of time helps to reconcile flat or network-like models of social activity with more structured, hierarchical ones