In this article, we explore the ways in which from the beginning to the end of twentieth century different temporalities and historicizations stemming from different narrative perspectives on the Balkan wars have constructed different commonplace, timeworn and enduring representations. In practical terms, we take issue with several patterns of narratives, such as the sensationalism of media industry, the essentialization of collective memory, the securitization of imaginary threats and the pacifist activism of normative transformations. It is our contention to argue that they historicize certain moments of rupture, which are subsequently used and misused to construct an anachronistic representation of Southeast Europe that may conceal hidden interests. Contrastingly, an alternative narrative that emphasizes a "history from below" as an apperception of the temporality of being can offer a revisionist approach that may show the futility of ahistorical accounts.
This paper proposes a model for a dynamic and constructivist perspective on generations. To study synchronous, contemporary interrelations between technology, media and generations, many different methodologies are available. Yet many historical, diachronic studies are marred by flaws and ambiguities in their use of ‘generation’ as a concept. To counter those problems, this paper argues for a process-oriented approach of generations – one which is modelled after Bolter and Grusin’s remediation. By distinguishing three mechanisms – immediate generation, immediate regeneration and hypermediate regeneration – the model of regeneration is linked to three theoretical concerns: the long-standing dilemmas in the sociological study of generations, the controversy around technological determinism in technology studies and contemporary challenges in research of ageing and youth cultures. The feasibility of the regeneration approach is elucidated by applying it to toys, especially educational toys. This paper also provides a methodology for the historical study of generations interacting with media and technology by recommending the combined use of three types of biographies as source materials.
The aim of this study was to analyze the psychometric properties of the widely used general procrastination, decisional procrastination, and adult inventory of procrastination scales in both undergraduate and adult Polish populations. Polish versions of these scales were filled out by 390 student and 513 adult participants. Principal component analysis indicated one-factor structure for each scale. The pattern of loadings was congruent between student and adult samples. The item-total correlation coefficients were adequate in each sample, with higher Cronbach's alpha values in adults compared to students, who reported higher procrastination scores in general procrastination and decisional procrastination scales. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the unidimensional model emerged as the best fit when the three scales were considered together. The results of the study suggest that Polish versions of the three procrastination scales are effective and reliable and contribute to the international debate about the dimensionality of procrastination.
The present study examined the factor structure and discriminant validity of the Zimbardo time perspective inventory in a sample of 8422 Hong Kong Chinese adolescents aged between 12 and 19 (3649 boys). Participants completed the ZTPI, Beck Depression Inventory II and Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders. Principal component analysis identified six factors (37 items), five of which corresponded to the original one and a new factor, present-impulsive. T-test results indicated that compared to low depression adolescents and low anxiety adolescents, high depression adolescents and high anxiety adolescents scored higher on the past-negative, present-impulsive, and present-fatalistic subscales but lower on the past-positive, present-hedonistic, and future subscales. It is suggested that the inventory can be used to help adolescents reflect on their time perspectives and to aid the development of psycho-educational programs that can help adolescents develop a more balanced perspective on time.
The present study investigated the interaction effect of time beliefs and interests in learning on the academic performance among Japanese junior high school students. We conducted a secondary analysis of a social science study whose data was provided by the Social Science Japan Data Archive. A total of 1672 junior high school students took an achievement test and responded to questionnaires that included items about time beliefs and interest in learning. The results of hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed that hedonists’ academic performance was worse than ascetics’. However, the results also showed that interests in learning had a positive influence on academic performance, and this effect was stronger for hedonists than for ascetics. These results indicate additional positive aspects of concentrating on the present time in the field of learning, and these findings may be helpful for students who do not have a future perspective.
Territoriality has primarily been seen as a spatial rather than temporal phenomenon. In this paper, we want to investigate how time functions in territorialising processes. In particular, we are attracted by the multi-temporality that is co-present in each process of territorialisation (i.e. processes in which time and space are used as means of measure, control and expression). The article is divided into two main parts. In the first part, we draw inspiration from Gilles Deleuze’s book Logic of Sense, as well as from authors such as Simmel, Whitehead, Benjamin and Jesi, in order to articulate three different types of the present (Aion, Kronos and Chronos). In the second part, we move to a short case study of the collector John Soane and the establishment of his house-museum. The case is used to exemplify how these three presents can be used to discuss and temporal aspects of territorialisation in general, and the production of a specific sort of territory – the house-museum as a new building type in particular.
The article examines well-being and social implications of "enforced leisure" resulting from unemployment and underemployment. The first part of the article reviews statistical and research evidence about social and well-being implications of unemployment and underemployment in the context of "technological unemployment" and globalization. The second part examines well-being implications of enforced leisure (due to being unemployed or working part time because the respondent "could not find a full-time job") based on time use and well-being data collected as part of 2005, 2008, 2009, and 2010 Canadian General Social Surveys. Indicators used in the analyses of social and well-being correlates of "enforced leisure" include respondents’ time use, levels of perceived happiness, life satisfaction, satisfaction with work–family balance, satisfaction with the use of time, self-assessed health, perceived stress, and indices of social integration such as sense of belonging to the community, trusting people, or exposure to socially destabilizing behavior.
Against conventional patterns of fandom loyalty, it is interesting to examine the behavioral patterns of enthusiastic fans who specifically choose to distance themselves from their favorite team and from reality during decisive matches. The present study explores the reasons and implications of such behavior, based on in-depth interviews with 19 soccer team fans in Israel who practice such purposeful avoidance. Findings show that such purposeful avoidance of games is generally motivated by a desire to avoid a source of stress or can be attributed to an illusion of influence, where purposeful avoidance is part of rituals whose irrationality is recognized by the fans themselves. Today, in the era of ubiquitous smartphones and social networks, purposeful avoidance becomes a true challenge.
This study examined whether the acceleration of the passage of time as people get older increases after 75 years of age. Individuals older and younger than 75 years, living either at home or in an institution, were asked to provide retrospective judgments of the passage of long periods of time, as well as judgments of the current passage of time using the Experience Sampling Methodology, in which a series of alerts are delivered everyday by mobile phone. The results showed that the retrospective judgment of the passage of time did not change with age. However, the older participants living in a retirement home, who were more negatively focused on their past, disagreed with the idea that time passes faster with increasing age. By contrast, the judgment of the current passage of time changed after 75 years. However, the perception was not one of acceleration but of slowing down. The best predictors of this slowing down of time were the negative affects, namely sadness, which were particularly high among the participants living in a retirement home. However, as their cognitive functions declined, they perceived time as passing quickly again, and this was accompanied by a greater feeling of happiness.
Future time perspective is a personality trait that involves people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions related to their futures. However, no multidimensional measures of future time perspective have been developed within Chinese cultural context. This study examined the structure of future time perspective by developing and validating a Future Time Perspective Scale for Adolescents and Young Adults in middle school and college student samples. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses resulted in a final measure that included 28 items loading onto six factors: Future-negative, future-positive, future-confusion, future-perseverant, future-perspicuity, and future-planning. The six-factor structure with high reliability and strong patterns of validity estimates was established. Future Time Perspective Scale for Adolescents and Young Adults will be useful in studies testing adolescents’ and young adults’ future time perspective. Future directions for the study of future time perspective in adolescents and young adults and limitations of the current study were discussed.
Waiting is a part of everyday life. It is often characterised by its banality: its quotidian nature. Time spent waiting can be seen as boring, wasted, and at times painful or distressing, or conversely hopeful or full of potential. The experience of Motor Neurone Disease (MND) reveals a population for whom (limited) time has a significant impact on quality of life. This paper will argue that waiting, for people with MND, exemplifies the relationship between time, power and agency. In so doing we can better conceptualise the manifold ways in which time and waiting are experienced through choosing to wait, enforced waiting and waiting when time is known to be ‘running out’. Through a sociological analysis of multiple forms of waiting three key themes emerged that characterised waiting as powerlessness; emotional (as a form of production), and; alternating as an experience between patience and endurance. This paper challenges the passivity, universality and ambivalence ascribed to waiting and instead argues that waiting affects the ‘time left’ for people with MND. It also offers up a lens through which to view time through the multiple textures and tensions of waiting produced through chronic illness.
The purpose of the paper is to present the main findings on the factor structure of time perspective measured using the Polish version of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (Zimbardo and Boyd, 1999) in different age groups. A total of 2789 adults took part in the study. Confirmatory factor analysis of Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory items was conducted in a group of respondents aged 18–78 years to verify the original five-factor structure. Separate principal component analyses were carried out for three age groups: 18–27, 28–39, and 40–65 years old. In the group of students, a fairly clear five-factor structure of time perspective was found. In the group of the oldest respondents, a three-factor structure emerged, which can be described as follows: Past-Negative combined with Present-Fatalistic, Past-Positive combined with Future, and a separate factor corresponding to the Present-Hedonistic scale. Differences in the factor structure of time perspective were interpreted in the context of developmental change.
Recent research and policy studies on the low-carbon future highlight the importance of flexible electricity demand. This might be problematic particularly for residential electricity demand, which is related to simultaneous consumers’ practices in the household. This paper analyses issues of simultaneity in residential electricity demand in Spain. It makes use of the 2011 Spanish Time Use Survey data with comparisons from the previous Spanish Time Use Survey and the Harmonised European Time Use Surveys. Findings show that media activities are associated with the highest levels of continuity and simultaneity, particularly in the early and late parts of the evening during weekdays.
Belonging is a fundamentally temporal experience, yet there exists to date little research on belonging as a temporal phenomenon. This paper offers an important contribution to the literatures on belonging, time and the self by exploring how the experience of belonging is tethered to time. Focussing on the temporal dimensions of the interconnection between belonging and the self contributes to our understanding of how people experience time and construct a sense of self. The data comprise 62 accounts on belonging written by members of the Mass Observation Project’s panel of volunteer writers residing in Great Britain. Two dimensions of duration are explored: first, enduring belonging compared to fleeting belonging and second, belonging that endures ‘out of time’. In relation to the first dimension, I argue that the duration of belonging aids in constructing a coherent self over time and thus speaks to a person’s moral character. The second dimension of duration illustrates experiences of belonging that defy understandings of linear temporality and a singular self, thus demonstrating the fundamentally distributed nature of the self. Attending to the duration of belonging also adds to our empirical understanding of how time is experienced by people.
The present study investigated the previously unexplored association between the perfectionistic personality dimensions, as defined by the 2 x 2 model of perfectionism, and individual time perspectives. The study tested the relationship between pure self-oriented, pure socially prescribed, mixed and non-perfectionist subtypes and individual time perspectives, using a sample of 129 undergraduate students with a mean age of 19.84 (SD = 4.60). Participants completed a one-time evaluation using the short versions of the Hewitt and Flett Multidimensional Perfectionism Scales and of the Zimbardo Time Perspectives Inventory. Following moderated hierarchical multiple regression analysis, the main result was discovering evidence of a close association between present fatalism and perfectionistic subtypes. Furthermore, pure self-oriented perfectionism consistently predicted more adaptive outcomes in terms of time perspectives as compared to non-perfectionism in four out of the five time perspectives, supporting the emerging empirical distinction between adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism. The study’s overall results indicate that pure self-oriented perfectionism may hold more adaptive merit than non-perfectionism in the case of time perspectives and that present fatalism may hold a close association with the perfectionistic variable.
What does it mean not to wait? It is possible to live in ways which do not entail waiting? Through close examination of time and its articulations among a group of US 1960s-generation ‘hippies’ and younger ‘drop outs’ in a rural backwater of Hawai‘i, I argue in this paper that it is possible to live without waiting. Drawing on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) and Baba Ram Dass’ countercultural invocation to ‘remember, be here now’, I explore unexpected interruptions to anticipated temporal flows. Structured around three vignettes on failing to hitchhike, learning to do ethnographic fieldwork through stopping trying to do ethnographic fieldwork and an unexpected interruption in the supermarket, this paper builds up a picture of non-waiting in action. Located against a backdrop of waiting as temporal interruption and affective mode, I argue that this group sought to collectively disrupt the affective modes of indifference and/or frustration they grew up with in urban mainland America. Through new forms of affective engagement they became able to collectively reframe temporal interruption as existing within rather than without local temporal flows, interruptions ceased to be ruptures to temporal textures but part of their very fabric. Located within temporal flows, they did not force individuals out of a moral community of (time is money) efficient, productive citizens but reframed productivity itself in terms of producing sociality, positive affective experience and communitas. Out of a multitude of moments of not waiting, a temporal texture of American counterculture emerges.
The present article argues that despite growing rates of single living worldwide, alternative representations of the single women who do not necessarily spend their life ‘waiting for the one’ are regularly absent from public view. By exploring the injunction as well as the option of non-waiting, this paper contributes to time studies by stressing how understandings of waiting inform hegemonic and alternative forms of temporal subjectivity and sociality. In the first part of this paper, I explore the ways in which the injunction to stop waiting is articulated in heteronormative imagery. This call is regularly expressed with temporal urgency, and from this vantage point waiting comes to represent passivity and immobility. Accordingly, women are expected to ‘move on’ and be active in their own self-governance, which adapts to conventional norms of femininity. In the second part of this article, I demonstrate how the option of non-waiting dismantles and reworks heteronormative life scripts, and offers new subject positions for single women. These reflections propose alternative timetables that allow single women to reclaim their temporal agency and re-define their own temporal rhythms and life trajectories.
A concept that lies at the heart of political rhetoric is that of ‘workfare’. The issue, however, is what types of arguments have been invoked to assert the value of the concept. During the 1960s and 1970s, extensive criticism emerged towards a working life that was said to hinder women’s emancipation; a working life that wasted resources and had a negative impact on the environment; a working life that sought material consumerism rather than quality of life. The demand for a work time reduction also received much support. In this article, we have studied the use of language that The Swedish Employers’ Confederation used when publicly formulating their stances on the work time issue in 1975. We have chosen to highlight the argument contained in a discussion pamphlet published by Swedish Employers’ Confederation, in a situation where the use of language was determined by the left-wing movement, and solidarity, international aid and daycare places were keywords, rather than growth and consumption. The arguments employed in the discussion pamphlet were based in the idea that non-work entails a lack of solidarity for social development. Those who desired a work time reduction were portrayed by Swedish Employers’ Confederation as environmental villains and opponents to the liberation of both oppressed women and the impoverished of the third world. Swedish Employers’ Confederation’s pamphlet can be regarded as an example on how capitalism may handle major criticism. By reversing the meaning of the core concepts of the criticism, opponents’ arguments were assimilated, which contributed to a new rationalization of the capitalism. One of the major contributions from our study to the research field is an improved understanding of how this process developed.
The telegraph literally and figuratively electrified news by transforming reporting into a process that delivered impulses of information whose timeliness often riveted and sometimes excited newspaper audiences. The now-familiar daily news cycle—scheduled reports of recent news punctuated by even more timely breaking news—originated with telegraphic journalism. Daily papers began presenting themselves as the public’s portal to an electrified national and international newsgathering network. Looking beyond the role of telegraph firms and wire services, this study explores how the culture of journalistic timeliness was cultivated in organizational, occupational, and public settings. Organizationally, telegraph-enabled timeliness altered every stage of the news-production process, from reporter-source interactions to the delivery of stories to readers. The press reified timeliness internally through organizational rewards and occupational discourses, and externally by projecting its institutional values through marketing and the metatexts that accompanied stories. For the audience, daily papers conveyed the temporal rhythms of a networked industrial society. Audiences valued some timely news as data inputs that enhanced opportunities to participate in distant affairs or influence outcomes, though for economic intelligence private channels almost always outstripped newspapers’ public delivery of the same information. But even electrified news valued mostly for its storytelling made events common to many people simultaneously in a manner that encouraged the construction of meaning by scattered audiences. In those situations, timeliness often meant that news circulated fast enough for reactions around the nation to become part of the story itself.
In a sample of 316 Chinese MBA students, the influence of Time Perspective on two types of unethical behaviors was tested. We differentiated between rule-based and social-concern issues. Time Perspective was measured by using a Chinese version of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory. Participants’ evaluation of the issues as ethical—or unethical—and their behavioral intention to violate business ethics were measured.
We assumed that Past-Positive and Future will enhance ethical orientation, whereas Past-Negative, Present-Fatalistic and deviance from balanced time perspective (DBTP) will reduce ethical orientation (evaluation of unethical practices as ethical and high behavioral intention to apply unethical practices).
For evaluation of rule-based issues, Past-Positive, Present-Hedonistic and Future significantly influenced in the predicted direction, whereas no significant effects of time perspectives for social concern issues were observed. According to behavioral intention, only Present-Fatalistic reached significance for both types of ethical issues in the predicted direction. Further, it was shown in a mediation-model that the influence of DBTP on behavioral intention to show unethical practices is mediated by the evaluation as ethical/unethical in the case of rule-based issues (in the case of social concern, the factors reached no significance or only nearby significances, respectively). Chinese managers with a high deviation from a balanced time perspective showed reduced evaluation of unethical practices as unethical, and an enhanced behavioral intention to show unethical practices. Other potential variables of influence, such as age, gender, the size of company, and the degree of globalization were considered, and their influences were controlled.
Time perspectives are of relevance for business ethics, but the relationship was only shown for rule-based issues. In the case of social concern, the relationship was only shown for Present-Fatalistic on behavioral intention.
Waiting is a universal experience and a ‘taken for granted’ form of time. However, it is given a social specificity when embodied by particular agents in particular settings. This paper reflects on the universal experience of waiting in the very particular setting of the prison, specifically a prison visitors’ centre; this is the space where families wait prior to visiting their incarcerated relatives. I draw on the literature of waiting and prisoners’ families, as well as my own empirical work and ethnographic observations of waiting families. In this work, I explore issues of power and agency, and explore the social relations which are orchestrated within and beyond this organisation of space and time. This paper aims to bring together two distinct areas of literature: one which explores how prisoners ‘do time’, and the other which explores the impact of imprisonment on the families outside. In marrying the two, this paper explores the temporal impact of the imprisonment on the family members of those incarcerated.
China’s economic and political reforms since 1978 represent one of the biggest institutional changes in the last century. Because most research has focused on the economics of institutional change rather than the evolution of political institutions, a theoretical framework to explain China’s rapid economic development is lacking. To understand the successes and failures of China’s institutional change, we reviewed China’s innovative political and economic practices during the past 30 years. We found that the country’s political and economic institutions combine to form a dynamic equilibrium that can explain the impressive economic results. China’s leaders dream of new institutions that will improve upon traditional Western capitalism, based on a combination of central planning with traditional capitalist approaches that increase the system’s flexibility. If China’s leaders can combine this approach with decreased social costs compared with previous socioeconomic systems, this will represent a new era and a model that other nations can follow.
Some time and temporarily scholars suggest that separation is one of the most arduous of human experiences. Given what is often a long history of unpleasant relationship endings, the clients of therapy themselves may be particularly susceptible to painful ruptures. Informed by a qualitative approach, I describe and explain how 10 Canadian children living with cystic fibrosis and their caregivers felt at the end of a research-based counselling support programme. At the programmes’ end, the participants reluctantly but unquestioningly accepted the decision. However, they expressed their desire for ongoing and continuous therapeutic opportunities to help them manage weighty emotional issues, such as living with grief and loss. I theorize the findings using time and temporality scholarship. Although academics and clinicians regard them as separate pillars, I suggest that participants experience considerable overlap between "research" and practice". Further, I propose that researchers and clinicians pay attention to therapeutic endings as an important issue in research. Finally, using a time and temporality lens, I use the findings to discuss how therapeutic work might better be regarded as occurring in the space of psychological time, rather than linear time. In so doing, it is evident that time and temporality are critical to how young people with CF and their families experience therapeutic endings.
Based on empirical research on the emergence of consumerism in Saudi Arabia, this article examines the shifts in the understanding of time that emerge in the competing paradigms of traditional and Islamic time, globalised world time and the individualisation of time in consumer pursuits. While Islamic time still provides the dominant frame for social life in Saudi Arabia, there have been adaptions to global time. While these are relatively unproblematic and technical, both traditional Arab and postmodern consumer times are less compatible, and especially the latter is posing a challenge to both Islamic and traditional timings.
The question of time is part of a general psychological reorientation which takes place in the Renaissance and appears in many of Shakespeare’s plays as a theme upon which to reflect. Time, no longer beneficial, becomes a source of anxiety: feudal time, linked to land and cultivation, providing comfort because the eternal repetition of natural cycles gives the illusion of reversibility, and therefore of a time which is redeemable, gives way to the notion of linear time, irreversible, unredeemable, the time of History (cf. Le Goff, Panofsky, Deleuze).
In Antony and Cleopatra, we find these different concepts of time battling against each other; Rome’s opposition to Alexandria, and Caesar’s opposition to Antony represent also two contrasting notions of time. Caesar’s time, and indeed Rome’s time, is very close to this new, modern concept, whose roots lie also in the springs and coils of renaissance machinery, time linked to power and money; wasting time means ‘being similar to beasts, he who wastes his time does not deserve to be called a man’ (cf. Le Goff). This is the kind of time Antony cannot face. Antony is tied to the past, but also to time as Aion, Cleopatra and Egypt’s time, associated with the ever-present, (cf. Heraclitus, Augustine), a time which is outside of history, a time which does not seem to lead inexorably to death and which is opposed to time as Chronos, linear and irreversible, time of history, the time of Rome. But Chronos is not simply ‘time the destroyer’; it opposes itself to chaos, it also means order, it means law. Roman time and Egyptian time can be seen as belonging to these two categories as does Caesar’s time when confronted with Antony’s time.
The term "shortening of time" is related to the Judeo-Christian tradition that announces the end of time as the moment when God, for the sake of the elect, shortens the duration of days and hours, because without this shortening no one would survive (This means that only a God's will could ended Time. The Christian perspective believes that the last days will be chaotic, and God will preclude History, ending time, to save a few men of goodwill.). While in this sense salvation is associated with divine intervention, the thesis of acceleration would reverse the above formula, making human beings responsible for the narrowing of time. But if the shortening of time in the Apocalypse is aimed at the salvation of the World: Where does acceleration, a secular idea of the shortening of time, aim? What is it that justifies the increase in the speed of completing tasks that previously took considerable time, which are today performed in just a few hours? How can we justify the frenzy to obtain what we want in the shortest time possible? In this paper we propose to address this and other questions, in order to show the relationship between a sociological understanding of acceleration with a theological-Christian view of time. In other words, the main claim exposes the transfer of teleology from a religious conception to a historical-worldly conception of time.
In this article, a perspective on work time patterns is outlined; a perspective that emphasizes the importance of observing how work time is subject not only to task and contract agreements but also to social norms and individual needs to express identity. The article takes its starting point in Goffman's dramaturgic approach. From this perspective, the workplace is viewed as a stage where a satisfactory work performance is judged not by the actual work performance but by the performance of work; or rather, perhaps, by how a morally good working day is enacted through text, words, and gestures. Depending on social context work, time patterns can be seen as an expression of commitment, dedication, professionalism, and masculinity. The article concludes with a discussion on the potential implications of these issues regarding stress and health, as well as the possibilities of participation in the labor market under equal conditions.
Sociological work has often characterized the contemporary future horizon as a space crowded with risks and contingencies. This view has prompted a number of claims that young adults conceptualize the future predominantly in terms of the choices and plans that they make to mitigate against such concerns. As an extension of this logic, a number of studies have suggested that young adults conceptualize the long-term future extending beyond their own lives separately from their more immediate horizon of planning (Leahy et al., 2010;
This study uses Conversation Analysis to investigate how doctors and patients talk about the duration of patients’ symptoms during acute general practice consultations in Denmark. Both parties treat it important to address and reach shared understanding about this issue, and it is the subject of much clarification and negotiation. Mentioning the duration of symptoms may be patient-initiated from the very outset of the consultation, as part of the problem presentation, or doctor-solicited in the subsequent interaction. Analysis reveals that in both cases, patients use concepts that stress relative duration as part of efforts to legitimise their visits. Legitimisation by such means is most evident in connection with doctor-solicited mention of duration of symptoms. Patients treat doctors’ questions as preferring an answer, which confirms that they have been sick for a long time. Overall, the study provides insight about the huge impact that discussions about time have for conversational organisation during consultations. It also shows how a shared understanding of the duration of symptoms is treated as a precondition for medical decisions and entitlements.
The paper studies two temporal metaphors, modern and poetic, encountered in a knowledge-based organization where they co-exist and conflict. It argues that the two metaphors are wedded to different discourses, i.e. to the macro-business and the micro-scientific discourse, respectively; hence, knowledge activities such as thinking and writing are increasingly rendered incomprehensible in commercialized research environments, and pushed at the margin of knowledge-work, since they prove difficult to measure and control. Practically, this implies a re-articulation of what innovation is and how to organize knowledge work. The paper explores the shortcomings linear metaphors of time bear when used to support radical innovation, and concludes by discussing the potentials of spiral time to structure work in knowledge organizations.
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are often proclaimed to facilitate the fragmentation of activities, a process whereby a certain activity is divided into several smaller pieces, which are performed at different times and/or locations. This study analyzes two-day combined activity, travel and communication diaries collected among Dutch households and presents quantitative findings of the associations between ICTs and the spatiotemporal fragmentation of paid labour. Controlling for various coping strategies, employment and commute factors, household characteristics, lifestyle orientation, time personality and spatial context, statistically significant relations were found between ICTs and the spatiotemporal fragmentation of paid labour for both men and women. The fact that both positive and negative associations were found suggests that ICTs can be adopted to make use of opportunities to arrange paid labour in a flexible way, or as a compensation when such opportunities are lacking. The results also indicate that up to a certain degree these associations are gender specific.
Based upon ethnographic data gathered in Shanghai, this paper explores residents’ experiences of, and responses to, living within an environment, which displays features of what Rosa terms ‘social acceleration’. After exploring anxieties induced in residents who feel sedentary – relative to others – and their attempts to cope with this, this paper focuses upon how residents’ attitudes towards social acceleration become refracted in imaginative forms, especially texts currently circulating within Shanghai, which insinuate ostensibly supernatural characters into certain prominent locations in the city. As these texts critique ‘progress’ and register residents’ anxieties regarding social acceleration so they smooth over disquiet and unease thereby encouraging not only discourses of development but also the patterns, pace and tempo of social acceleration. The final part of this paper explores the costs of ‘slowdown’, arguing these are sufficient to compel residents not only to re-engage with, and therefore perpetuate, socially accelerating forms but perhaps even to intensify them, hence the deployment of the term ‘re-acceleration’ in the title of this paper.
As a massively popular crime drama, Crime Scene Investigation has circulated influential images and narratives that suggest that the processing and analysis of forensic evidence can be done in a swift and timely manner. The claim of such a CSI effect is based on the relative absence of waiting scenes within the series. This article examines the series’ multiple representations of time and waiting, linking the absence of waiting to the construction of forensic scientists as powerful figures of moral authority. In the episode Grave Danger, however, waiting is notably imagined as something that must be experienced and endured as a result of conviction. It is made analogous to death, and embodied through horizontality as well as by feminized waiters. Because the feminization of waiters also characterizes the representation of television viewers, I end by examining how the role of waiting in Crime Scene Investigation is intertwined with the viewer’s experience of watching the planned flow of network television. Ultimately, this article argues that the study of televisual waiting requires a recognition that images and narratives on network television emerge out of and depend on waiting as representation, experience, and performance.
Research has shown the importance of prospective thinking in the understanding of individual behaviour across different contexts. However, there has not been extensive attention paid to individuals’ future time perspective (FTP) in non-normative contexts, such as prison, especially using qualitative research methods. In this study, we qualitatively analyse the FTP of 16 Portuguese male prisoners, ranging in age from 24 to 51 years (M = 35, SD = 8 (idem)) and serving sentences from one to 25 years (M = 8.6, SD = 7.3). Through content analysis of data obtained in semi-structured interviews, four main categories emerged: life prior to prison, adaptation to prison, activities in prison, and perspectives concerning the future. Considering the primary features of FTP (content, extension, valence), we determined that prisoners develop FTP in different life domains. However, the extension and emotional valence of their FTP were influenced by the sentence time and perceived social support. The results are discussed regarding the importance of counselling and of the construction of future plans in the context of prison as relevant factors for individual adaptability.
Time is conventionally conceptualized in terms of space, also affecting the articulation of identity. The relation between time, space and identity will be discussed through theoretically questioning the formal expression of future time, and particularly "will" future, in English to observe its potential cognitive and pragmatic implications – i.e. how ‘future-ness’ can become "strategic" – on identity construction – cf. "progressive identity" – and persuasion. Barack Obama’s e-mail campaigning (2008–2010) is used as a case in point. More specifically, the articulation of ‘future-ness’ emerging here suggests interesting consequences on national and political identity construction and consent creation. If the consistent use of new information and communication technologies has been crucial in determining Barack Obama’s communicative fortune, his rhetorical style (inclusive rhetoric, progressive logic, conceptual reframing) has also been undoubtedly significant in the construction of his audience consent, at least in the first part of his Presidency. But the question is, how this progressive logic comes to be specifically constructed and articulated along with the audience involvement? The present article focuses on some persuasive instances observable in Barack Obama’s e-mail campaigning (2008–2010) to reason on the discoursal move the President suggests from intention negotiation to will creation and political action. More specifically, it will investigate the discoursal construction of ‘progressive identity’, ideological change and involvement creation before and after the elections. Additionally, the strategic use of the shifting from public/institutional to private sphere will also be taken into account as a specific medium-driven characteristic. In this respect, particularly significant has come out to be the articulation of ‘future-ness’ as identity projection, which is in turn continuously negotiated amongst the subjects of the discourse.
People choosing a pet have a number of factors to consider. The important one is whether a pet can synchronize with humans in sleep timing. Chronotype reflects individual differences in sleep timing. Social jetlag referring to a misalignment of one’s own biological (internal) time compared to the social time reflects variability in sleep timing between work and free days and is considered a health risk factor. In this study, chronotype and social jetlag of dogs and people living together were assessed based on a survey carried out in Poland, Germany and Spain (N = 730; 74% female; age = 36.1 ± 12.8). Participants living with dogs informed about their own and their dogs’ sleep habits. This study demonstrates synchrony in sleep timing between humans and dogs living together. Dogs experienced less social jetlag than their owners and differences between owners and dogs were more pronounced in Poland than in Germany and Spain. Polish dogs had the lowest social jetlag amongst dogs from the three countries, suggesting a greater stability of their sleep–wake cycle and less influence of the owners’ activity on their rhythm. Chronotype of dogs was earlier than that of their owners in all countries. Spanish dogs had the latest sleep pattern, followed by German dogs, with Polish dogs being the earliest. Analyses also revealed that both chronotype and social jetlag in dogs and humans living together are correlated – the later the chronotype of the owner the later the chronotype of his/her dog. The results suggest that dogs synchronize to humans in their sleep patterns.
The study presented here applies from an interdisciplinary perspective the "temporal know-how" of art and communication design as well as the social sciences to the exploration of the impact of two types of holistic artistic waiting room transformations on waiting experience and behaviour. The quasi-experiment was conducted in a hospital and in an administrative setting. Contrary to current information centred types of waiting management stressing ‘clock-time’ only and attempting to reduce objective waiting times, the artistic intervention follows a holistic concept by appealing to all the senses influencing felt time and social time. It comprises visual, acoustic, tactile/haptic and olfactory elements (fragrance management). The "observation-oriented" artistic intervention uses contemplative video works, ornamentation, relaxing fragrances and a corresponding seating design. The "action-oriented" room climate promotes communication and stimulating object and surface design, coupled with a subliminally stimulating fragrance environment. After a simultaneous one-week baseline measurement in both organizations, follow-up measures were conducted during one week of each type of intervention. Results are based on 482 personal interviews and 1950 observations of waiting clients: Perceived waiting time and objective waiting time correlated only moderately (rp = 56) and expected waiting time was overestimated. In both waiting room settings, room transformations – compared to baseline measures – reduced waiting stress behaviour (however not perceived stress) and increased both positive overall room perception and the evaluation of specific room characteristics among clients/patients. Differences between the two room climates were not significant and effects appear to be stronger in the administrative space. The relatively short waiting times (16–20 min) and high levels of waiting satisfaction at baseline might have limited the effect size of the holistic interventions. At the same time observed positive outcomes can be plausibly expected in waiting zones with much longer waiting times.
This article explores the experiences of temporality. It argues that experience of time is a key and undervalued feature of practice; a feature that furthers understandings of how practice becomes normalised. Practice theory advocates that experiences of time are experiences of practice. This article does not wish to refute this claim, rather it aims to extend it by exploring the complexities of the relationship between practice and temporality. Drawing upon an empirical study of a hair salon and women’s hair appointment practices, this article unpicks the drivers of shared practice from the physical to the normative, to the notion that experiences of time spent engaging in practices drives their performance. Introducing the concept of self-time, it makes three main arguments. Firstly, that exploring and prioritising experiences of time (how time spent doing a practice feels) illuminates further elements of collective practice. Practices may not be what they seem and seemingly obvious outcomes, such as showering to clean the body, are also undertaken because of other subsequent intentions. Secondly, that practices and their most recognisable outcomes (showering to clean the body) legitimise the time spent engaging in them. Thirdly, and most importantly, that experiences of time are a key feature of practice and one that should not be overlooked in the drive to understand how practices become normalised and collective activities.
Recently, the phenomenon of social acceleration, which has profound impacts on everyday life, has attracted some attention from social scientists. At the same time, an increased engagement with social practices that are related to slowing down has also been highlighted, thereby unveiling an inherent tension between fast and slow times in contemporary societies. However, little attention has been paid to how fast and slow times are spatially dispersed and rooted.
This study contributes to current discussions on the pace of life by considering the dynamics of speeding up and slowing down in the everyday life of residents in a neighborhood of an edge city and the role played by local resources in the performance of everyday life practices. We undertook our study in the Colinas do Cruzeiro neighborhood, in the municipality of Odivelas in the North of Lisbon’s metropolitan area, where we conducted 21 in-depth narrative interviews with residents with the purpose of understanding the spatiotemporal organization of their daily lives and the role of the neighborhood’s resources.
Our results identify four different timestyles among the interviewees, all of them fluctuating between fast and slow temporalities in different ways. Thereafter, we identify and describe the main practices of speeding up and slowing down in the interviewees’ everyday life and the local resources, which are mobilized in Colinas do Cruzeiro in order to perform these practices. We give some conclusions after a brief discussion of the results. Our main argument is that local resources play a vital role in an individual’s ability to speed up or slow down and therefore more attention must be paid as to how local resources can become temporal advantages.
The aim of the present research was to explore the role of individual differences in time perspective (TP) in predicting two relationship quality indicators: general relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction, in romantic heterosexual couples. A total amount of 100 dyads took part in the study. Our study revealed that relationship satisfaction indices are predicted by partners’ time perspectives; both actor and partner effects proved significant. For instance, past-negative was related to lower general relationship satisfaction, whereas past-positive proved detrimental to sexual satisfaction. Higher relationship (but not sexual) satisfaction was related to a more balanced time perspective. Moreover, we demonstrated that the role of some time perspective dimensions may change with relationship length, e.g., a relationship between future-positive (FP) time perspective and females’ relationship satisfaction proved to change across relationship course from significantly negative to strongly positive. Contrary to our hypotheses, we found no evidence for assortative mating effects for time perspective dimensions. The present results provide evidence for the role of psychological temporality in relationship functioning and suggests potential utility of time perspective theories in practical interventions aimed to improve romantic relationships’ quality.
Our study focuses on everyday manifestations of contemporary socioeconomic change. For a sample of young- and middle-aged German employees gathered in 2008 (N = 281), we investigate the relationship of perceived rising demands regarding (a) the labor market and (b) the workplace context with subjective job insecurity. Regression analyses reveal a positive effect of rising labor market demands on job insecurity, which is buffered by education. The effect of education on job insecurity is mediated by rising labor market demands. Rising workplace demands show no effect on job insecurity for West German employees. In contrast, East Germans who experience rising workplace demands report lower levels of job insecurity. Results are discussed with a particular focus on rising demands in employment relationships.
The question when people work is almost always reduced to the question how much people work on (non-)standard working hours. In this contribution, we applied optimal matching techniques using Belgian data from a weekly work grid (n = 6330) to identify individuals’ work timing patterns, offering a richer analytical approach than most previous studies on (non-)standard work time. Results show that such analysis captures much more and much more relevant variation in the timing of work than simple questions. Three general and 10 more detailed weekly work patterns are identified based on two dimensions of paid work: the number of hours worked and the percentage of hours worked on non-standard periods of time. Additional analyses show that men’s work patterns depend only on job characteristics. For women, work patterns are also explained by socio-economic factors including education, presence of working partner and presence of children.
Despite fears of global overpopulation, population declines are becoming a significant demographic problem in developed and rapidly developing countries. If we have no effective measures to solve the problem, the world’s population will continue to age, and some small ethnic groups will face a risk of extinction. The human race’s social and genetic diversity therefore face significant challenges. The failure to raise birth rates in developed regions suggests that preventing adverse consequences from the population decline will not depend on our good intentions or on new technology, but rather on recognition of the problems resulting from an evolved institution based on low birth rates. Changing this institution will require us to enhance the social status of women, but will also require practical recognition of their unique needs in the context of childbearing and raising children. However, this innovation represents a huge challenge to overcome because of human resistance to change of existing institutions.
Imprisonment is the exemplary symbol of waiting, of being stuck in a space and for a time not of our choosing. This concept of waiting is perfectly represented by the image of the prison cell. In this paper, I contrast the cell with the less familiar imagery of the corridor, a space of prison that evokes and involves mobility. Through this juxtaposition, I aim to show that prisons are as much places of movement as stillness with associated implications for penal power and purpose. I argue that the incomplete imaginary of prison as a cell (and waiting as still) may operate as a necessary fiction that both sustains and undermines its legitimacy. By incorporating the corridor into the penal imaginary, key premises about how prisons do and should work, specifically by keeping prisoners busy, and how prison time flows and is experienced, are disrupted.
Many different social contexts are embedded in, and mediated by, visual practices, 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 representations 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 portraying 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.
What is time? What is its nature? Is time something natural or cultural? Is it the property of knowing objects or the property of knowing subjects? How has time been conceived, defined, and characterized throughout history by philosophical and scientific thinking? What are the theoretical obstacles that have historically prevented a better understanding of time? Why does that concept still remain so mysterious and enigmatic these days? In the search for the answers to these and other questions, this article explores the concept of time of one of the greatest and most influential sociologists of the 20th century—the German Norbert Elias (1897–1990)—whose sociological theory has been of great value to the debate on the problems of contemporary society. In recent decades, his reflections on time that guided by a holistic and procedural perspective have caused a spreading impact, becoming compulsory reading for anyone wanting to study the topic. By questioning and critical analysis of the bases on which Elias’ concepts of time are founded, this article aims to instigate and contribute to a debate founded on the nature of time.
In this article, Compton-Lilly proposes that time acts as a constitutive dimension of people’s experiences that significantly affects the ways people make sense of their worlds. After briefly examining the ways time has been conceptualized in educational practice, she explores the temporal affordances of three highly influential theories described by Bakhtin, Bourdieu, and Lemke. To illustrate the temporal potential of these theories, Compton-Lilly draws upon data from a 10-year case study of one student and his family. Temporality is revealed as a multifaceted contextual dimension. Attending to the various ways people operate within time provides important insights into the construction of longitudinal processes including identity construction, literacy learning, and becoming a student. These insights are important not only to researchers who attempt to make sense of the experiences of children and teachers, but also to educators who must seek ways to acknowledge and effect the longitudinal trajectories of children.
In societies that undergo transformation such as those in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, in the opinion of many, the value of people's time changes. This produces changes in the structure of consumption and the supply of labour. Most probably, at least during the initial years of transition, there is a growing awareness of the time wastage that occurred under the previous system (queuing for basic necessities, plus very limited availability of equipment to facilitate and accelerate household chores).
In pre-1989 Poland, where market rules did not apply, three time-use surveys were conducted for the entire adult population of the country (1975–1976; 1982; 1984). Looking at their findings, one must take into account the "exceptional" circumstances in which the population had to function—a shortage of goods and services, regulated prices, and no official unemployment are just some of the features of the socialist system. After the change in the socioeconomic system, in the years 2003–2004, another representative time use survey was conducted. The results showed time allocation under completely different conditions—with distinct cyclical fluctuations in the economy, real wages rising, involuntary unemployment, and the supply of household appliances.
The purpose of this article is to compare the differences in time allocation, which result not only from the passage of time. The results from 1984 describe Polish people functioning under conditions created by so-called real socialism. Two decades later, the survey reveals the picture of time use in this society in an economic environment that has been to a large extent liberalized.
There are many theories of what is causing a sense of social acceleration and the ‘time squeeze’ in modern society, such as the notion that individuals are ‘doing more’ through increased consumption, or the increasing difficulty that many people face coordinating with networks due to de-synchronised and de-routinised employment and life-style practices. In this regard qualitative empirical work has often been focused on dual-income middle-class couples. To explore an under-developed area, this article considers the socio-temporal organisation of 10 working sole fathers’ and 17 working sole mothers’ daily lives. This study finds that for working sole parents a sense of time squeeze or acceleration is principally due to structural aspects of workplaces and parenting practices. In particular, parenting routines, school and childcare times and work times are fixed events which create a time squeeze in the mornings and evenings. These normative and structural temporalities appear more influential on working sole parents’ daily lives than consumption norms or de-synchronisation aspects of managing networks.
Time perspective is crucial in adolescence and youth, when individuals make important decisions related to their present and future. The focus of this research was to use the six-factor short version Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (S-ZTPI) scale in a sample of adolescents and young adults, and to analyse its associations with decision-making, relational styles and engagement. A structural equation model of the effects of S-ZTPI on these variables was computed, and its psychometric properties were found adequate. The results underline that young people’s present orientation is associated with a relational style based on confidence in oneself and others, and with active engagement in terms of responsibility and trust in a better future. Our findings suggest a positive description of adolescents’ views, as they are able to enjoy the time they are living in without giving up their responsibilities for making a better world for the future.
The "time perspective" becomes increasingly relevant in psychological assessment, but time constraints sometimes prevent the use of the popular Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI) in its full extent. This study focuses on short versions (ZTPI–short), comprising 3 items for each scale, 15 items in total (18 when Future-Negative is added). Objectives included testing the psychometric properties of the abbreviated ZTPI and optional balancing of the Future scale with its negative counterpart.
Two modifications were used, the five-scale form, structurally corresponding to the original ZTPI (Past-Negative, Past-Positive, Present-Hedonistic, Present-Fatalistic, and Future scales), and a six-scale adaptation with a Future-Negative scale added. Both versions were verified on nationally representative samples in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (N = 2068).
Psychometric properties proved to be good with or without the Future-Negative scale as corroborated by adequate scale distribution, by consistency (Cronbach's alpha), reliability between short and long versions, validity of short and long versions with respect to the sociodemographic profile, by results of structural equation modeling confirming international invariance in a comparative multigroup perspective as well as good fit (confirmatory factor analysis) of five- and six-factor model for the Czech and Slovak ZTPI–short (separately or with a pooled sample). The five-scale ZTPI–short had a slightly better model fit than the six-scale version, the Future-Negative scale correlated strongly with the Past-Negative scale.
The ZTPI–short is a quality instrument for assessing time perspective and can be recommended for further use.
This article provides a first attempt to describe time use among Members of Parliament (MPs). Drawing on an original survey on time use and a time diary of three working days (Wednesday–Friday) collected in 2013 among New Zealand MPs (N = 22), it presents a quantification and description of MPs’ time use. The data indicate that with an average of 13 h 20 min, MPs have long working days and many seem to face work–life balance issues. MPs also undertake a broad variety of activities during their working time, with meetings with various actors taking up a large part of their time. Finally, a correspondence analysis reveals that male and female MPs as well as first term and more experienced MPs display some differences in their time use. Social activities dominate more of the time of male MPs than they do for female MPs. Experienced MPs seem to spend more time in the House than first-term MPs. The latter spend more time on communication than experienced MPs.
In industrialized nations, patterns of behavior such as attending work or school are strongly predicted by the seven-day weekly calendar. The weekly cycle can be disrupted by unexpected events (e.g. familial death) or planned days off (e.g. vacation). Because the weekly cycle typically begins on Monday, people should expect others who experience disruption to re-enter the weekly cycle on Mondays in order to synchronize with the conventional weekly pattern. Study 1 examined expectations for returning to work after the death of a spouse, Study 2 examined expectations for returning to university classes after the death of a parent, and Study 3 examined preferences for Monday versus Friday holidays from work and from classes. All three studies showed an overwhelming expectation for returning to work or class on Mondays, and people explained this expectation by referencing time (e.g. it's time to get back to routine). Expectations of return times other than Monday were explained by referencing emotion (e.g. she's upset and can't think straight). Conceivably, expectations to synchronize behavior to the beginning phases of a cycle hold across daily, weekly, and annual cycles.
Can democracy be resilient in an increasingly ‘high-speed society’? Social acceleration, some critics argue, poses a serious threat to the idea and practice of democracy. Others invoke but do not develop the idea of ‘slow democracy’ as one important response to this threat. Despite its importance, the critique and response lack analytical depth. In this context, and in an effort to rebuild the debate on a stronger and more fruitful base, the article underscores the potential of political agency to shape democracy’s temporality and reframes ‘slow democracy’ as a challenge of democratic design.
This paper uses data from the healthcare sector to explore how clock time organization influences therapeutic performance. The case of a pediatric physiotherapist offers an important opportunity to examine how clock time, mediated by a variety of organizational and social systems, imposes limitations to the individual activity, in terms of learning, experimenting, and innovating. Social, cultural, institutional, and organizational layers have developed around this universal time reference. They impose an in-depth and taken for granted time discipline on organizational actors. The job of the physiotherapist conflicts with this clock time discipline when she has to respond to the evolving needs of her patients. Based on her expertise, the therapist decides on the necessary care, including duration and frequency of treatment. The measured time allocation imposed by the healthcare system and the time-based reward system generate pressure on, and interfere with, the unfolding activity. The study illustrates how the therapist escapes these multiple constraints and how this enables her to focus on the therapeutic acts. Taking the therapeutic process as temporal reference reveals the impact of clock time discipline on the unfolding therapeutic activity. I conclude that open-ended activities are inhibited and distorted by this socially constructed time not only because they cannot unfold but also because the temporal framing prevents deliberation and initiative.
This article describes how time was used dynamically by a group of people at risk of losing their lives. It is shown how these people appeared to experience a change in the relationship between inner and outer time and that time literally was felt in this situation. An empirical investigation of 16 cancer patients performing their jobs while going through demanding treatment programs found time as their main motive for working while being seriously ill. Actions at work point to a time ahead, so by taking part in the time at the workplace they were inscribed in a future presently under pressure by their cancer diagnosis. The article describes how cancer-struck women and men perceived time in their different life-worlds, at work, at home on temporary sick leave, and at the hospital, and it shows how these perceptions changed during the process of recovery. To these people, time appeared in three forms: a time beyond control, realizing that they had cancer; taking control of time, discovering that they could go to work; the time of the future, which was their new perception of time as cured. This new perception of time reflected the incidental discovery of the cancer, realizing life as coincidental. Having their life time threatened made them feel vulnerable and liminal (neither sick nor well, but on the way to recovery). This vulnerability can be seen as the result of a breakdown of our taken-for-granted space–time world. For these people, going to work seemed to reduce the unbearable waiting time towards recovery by re-establishing links to a well-known life-world, the workplace.
This article presents the introduction and the update of an ethnographic research on temporality among indigenous groups, published in 2011 in its full version as a book in Spanish. It seeks to prove the usefulness of the conceptual distinction between time, defined as the phenomenon of becoming in itself, and temporality, defined as the human apprehension of becoming in a cultural context. Furthermore, the existence of non-hegemonic temporalities is exemplified by a case study of originary temporality with Mocoví indigenous societies in Argentina’s Chaco region. The methodology built for studying temporality in different social groups, termed here as cultural rhythmics, is also introduced. By studying different rhythmic experiences integrated in the participant observation, the rhythmic method enables us to interpret social facts that are implicit in the everyday practices of organisation, in the economic–political relations, and in the group’s worldviews.
The paper analyzes young cannabis users’ experiences of time from two different perspectives, one looking at how their everyday life is related to social time structures and another looking at their actual time management strategies. The paper shows that intense drug use is a reason behind the interviewees’ underinvolvement in interaction time, institutional time, and cyclic time. Yet, drug use may also be an attempt at solving problems with time management, a strategy that again brings the users further away from the social time structures of society. We identify temporal synchronicity, or rather the lack of this, as a central challenge for the interviewees’ social identities and general feelings of a meaningful everyday life. Further, we argue that the young cannabis users are both social and temporal "outsiders" to society and that new time management strategies are key to reversing this process of social marginalization. The paper is based on qualitative interviews with 30 young cannabis users in outpatient drug treatment in Denmark.
Time is a social and subjective construct that establishes qualitative differences in the flow of events, that is associated with an individual’s sociodemographic and cultural background, and that affects their attitudes and behavior. The relevance of the past, present, or future as well as the particular meaning of these temporal frames varies depending on each individual’s life experiences and social status. These qualitative and differentiated meanings of time have been studied in many countries through the concept of "time perspectives." This paper presents the findings of the first application of Zimbardo’s Time Perspective Inventory in Chile and establishes correlations between its factors and sociodemographic and cultural variables. This paper aims to present comparable data for the study of time perspectives, provide theoretical and empirical evidence to progress in the study of the multidimensional nature of time in Chile, and discuss the possibilities and challenges posed by Zimbardo’s Time Perspective Inventory as an instrument for the empirical study of time.
Through the revisit of a previous study, conducted in 1980, the present research inquiries, in 2010, the relationship between economic and social circumstances, territorial rootedness, and temporal experience among the workers of a Portuguese industrial community. Interlocking ethnographic observation, biographic interviews, and extensive survey, the research explores the inflection, occurred between 1980 and 2010, in the interpretation of historical change spread among those workers, especially the transformation of their retrospective vision of the past dictatorial regime of Estado Novo (1933–1974). The research brings, therefore, a contribution to the study of the schemata of temporal perception and interpretation used in a particular community, pointing especially to the verbal and emotional expressions that constitute there the remembrance of the past. Nostalgia or melancholy emerges, thus, as expressions introduced by the changes on the local systems of expectations and opportunities of the community and, simultaneously, as personal and collective tactics used to cope with the present situation through the rehabilitation of the memory. At the same time, this article shows the pregnancy in revaluating or reproducing preceding researches, in the original or similar sites of inquiry, with a reflexive posture regarding the situated production of knowledge.
Advanced modernity is regarded as an era of time obsession and people in modernized societies seem to live harried lives. Leading time sociologists like Hartmut Rosa adopt a modernization–critical stance and ascribe an accelerated pace of life and frequent time scarcity to socioeconomic and technological advancement. According to these protagonists of the "acceleration debate," time becomes increasingly precious due to severely changed conditions of work and private life. Against this background it can be assumed that many people may suffer from an unsatisfactory work–life balance. This study uses individual-level data from the fifth round of the European Social Survey (fielded in 2010/11) as well as suitable country-level data capturing key features of advanced modernity to empirically test assumptions arising from the "acceleration debate." Results from multilevel analyses of 23 European countries provide some confirmation of these assumptions. While most macro indicators for 2010 reflecting a certain stage of development are uninfluential, a country's degree of globalization matters, and moreover growth rates of crucial macro indicators signaling paces of development exert an impact on people's work–life balance in the assumed direction: In countries with accelerations in terms of economic development, coverage of households with internet access and numbers of new cars working people show a significantly greater inclination toward an unsatisfactory work–life balance. Aside from results at the country-level individual-level determinants and group-specific differences of work–life balance under different conditions of advanced modernity are presented. This study's two main findings—(1) paces of development matter more than stages of development and (2) assumptions arising from the "acceleration debate" receive some empirical support—are thoroughly reflected on and discussed.
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games are graphical virtual environments in which gamers interact with each other through avatars many hours a day on a daily basis. The most widely accepted criterion of problematic variants of the gaming is the amount of time spent on the games. In this study, we show that time use might not be a very adequate measurement of the extent of the problem. We have analyzed an interview material with 17 (=n) gamers, and 115 (=n) applications to a gamers’ guild, identifying gamers’ perception of time and temporality. Firstly, our study shows that time spent on gaming varies a lot over time depending on other life activities and the overall life situation of the gamer. Secondly, our study indicates that due to the nature of the activity, gamers can develop time management skills over time. Concrete techniques to enjoy the flow of the game, but still function well in other life spheres involve, for example, economizing other activities, setting alarm clocks, and schedule "gaming binges." We also discuss some conceptual differences made between serious leisure, on the one hand, and addiction, on the other.
Traditional urban planning methodologies cannot solve today’s planning challenges that cities pose. Citizens’ needs have substantially changed the last decade while urban planning methods have remained the same since the 70s. A more citizen-centric urban planning is presented in this paper. To that end, and to effectively deal with citizens’ larger data needed for the urban planning methodological reinvention, interdisciplinary work is supported with information and communication technologies. We conducted a survey of citizens on urban time-use (Marsal MLl and López MB (2014) Smart urban planning: Designing urban-land-use from urban time-use. Journal of Urban Technology 21(1): 39–54). The results on urban-time-use distribution were converted into urban-land-uses as pioneering methodology for the reinvention of urban planning methodologies. In order to get the highest voluntary participation from citizens to ensure a good representation of all ages and social groups, the survey has to be designed with adaptive hypermedia techniques. The adaptive hypermedia techniques we propose in this paper combine stereotype and feature-based models which we explore for the purpose to include them in the survey. The combination of stereotype and feature-based models has different advantages, among others: stereotype techniques avoid to initiate survey profiles from scratch and feature-based techniques allow a personalized questionnaire to be employed. Moreover, personalization, in combination with user profiles, allows prediction which is of great interest for this research due to its planning purposes.
Theories of modernity and risk society argue that increasing levels of risk fundamentally alter or lower the level of trust in society. In this article we argue that this assumption is based in a fallacious theoretical link between trust and risk. Rather than calculative assessment of risk and specific events, trust directs anticipation towards process. First, we outline dominant approaches to trust as a question of actions and uncertainty of outcomes, arguing that these approaches treat trust and chance as interchangeable, conflating the different socio-temporalities within which risk and trust, respectively, reside. Secondly, the issue of temporality is traced in Luhmann’s work on trust and it is demonstrated how his dichotomous treatment of social time conflates markedly different temporal experiences. As a solution to this, the article presents the notion of a third temporal mode of the process present from Deleuze's concept of becoming. This is theoretically reconnected to the process present to trust theory, arguing that the uncertainty trust deals with, is connected to process experience rather than expectations of the future. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and empirical consequences of a socio-temporal distinction between trust and chance, and argue that trusting is an epistemological slip and space of non-reflexivity, that transform time to process.
Time is both an ambiguous concept and a pervasive fact of collective and individual existence. Theorized, regulated, lived, time can be understood under the focus of a subjective or objective lenses. Nevertheless it is possible to identify modern patterns in the use of time that helped in the construction of a tacit and objective knowledge of how to conduct life as a member of society, family, and labor communities. In this article, we intend to discuss the thesis that contemporary public policy engages a new form of Foucault’s "biopolitics" in a context of desynchronization of lifecycle and questioning of those patterns. The current state regulation, objectified in public policies in general and social policies in particular, includes characteristics of behavioral standardization, but now not under the mediation of disciplinary structures, but under the focus on the individual, of an action from himself on himself.
Over the past 40 years, there has been a slow trend toward gender equality regarding time use in paid and unpaid work. However, the gendered division of housework remains. This article examines the gender segregation in domestic work in order to contrast the influence of welfare regimes and employment status on the organization of everyday life. The analysis is based on time use variables according to the type and daily frequency of household tasks. First, a descriptive cross-national study of European countries is presented to contextualise how institutional factors are involved in patterns of time use. Second, a specific case in Spain is studied to assess how employment status influences the distribution of housework. The results show that daily maintenance tasks represent a limit for the equal distribution of housework by gender. It is concluded that women's employment is a necessary but not sufficient condition for gender equality.
Clock-time differentiates and systematises in a way rarely endorsed by small-scale societies, where the tendency is to reject hierarchy based on the measurement of time. Taking my lead from the Karawari-speaking Ambonwari of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea, I introduce the concept of egalitarian temporality produced by never ending competition between different individuals and groups. The villagers are themselves responsible for creating periods and ways of being in both their environment and society, and they actively participate in dramatic episodes intended to cut into their existent ways of life. These ‘cuts’ then create desired changes. I argue that time in the Sepik and egalitarian small-scale societies in general is very much agentive and thus possessed, held and seen by individuals and groups, with periods defined by and organized around future oriented projects.
A positive focus on the present, the only time zone which we experience directly and permanently, is at least as relevant as perspectives on the past and future in a balanced time perspective and its relation to wellbeing. Yet, few instruments examining a positive present time perspective exist. Two present-directed concepts, mindfulness and flow, that are intrinsically linked to mental wellbeing were analyzed and used to formulate a present-eudaimonic scale that complements the past and future scales of the balanced time perspective scale. The present study addresses the psychometric properties of the present-eudaimonic scale and the modified balanced time perspective scale.
131 participants filled out the present-eudaimonic scale, the balanced time perspective scale, the Zimbardo time perspective inventory, the five facet mindfulness questionnaire – short form, the Swedish flow proneness questionnaire and the mental health continuum – short form. Balanced time perspective was operationalized using the deviation from a balanced time perspective coefficient.
The present-eudaimonic scale showed good psychometric properties including internal consistency, factor structure, and convergent validity. The present-eudaimonic scale explained an additional eleven percent of variance in mental health beyond the other time perspective scales. Balanced time perspective as measured with the modified balanced time perspective scale correlated significantly stronger with mental health than balanced time perspective measured with the Zimbardo time perspective inventory.
The present-eudaimonic scale fills a gap in the assessment of time perspective and the modified balanced time perspective scale is a promising way to study balanced time perspective.
Recent literature has explored the processes of global change associated with the social relations, technologies, and economies of time, as well as the move from clock time to event time and network time. Others have focused on the ‘presence bleed’ evident in technologically-mediated work. A harried pace of life is exacerbated in what Judy Wajcman calls an ‘acceleration society'. She points to how technologies can change the nature of current practices as well as create new ones. This article critically examines discourses of ‘internet addiction’, by considering the phenomenon of internet use in the context of societal shifts in temporal relations. Drawing on a recent qualitative study of four adult heavy internet users, the analysis employs Bourdieu’s theory of practice and notions of flow to explain the understandings and performance of temporality in the lives of so-called ‘internet addicts’. The data illustrate complex multiple realities and multifaceted behaviours that comprise current social use of the internet and subsequent ‘digital pathologies’. The article argues that the individual pathology model of internet addiction is not useful given the dramatic changes in temporality produced by digital technology. It suggests that the assumptions about the correct use of time embedded in notions of addiction reproduce binary distinctions between the real and the virtual, production and consumption and work and play which no longer reflect social practice. While it is certainly the case that users can be troubled by their inability to control their online activities, these experiences need to be understood within the specific social contexts of users’ lives rather than being interpreted through a universal and medicalised model of addiction.
Social dilemmas typically require individuals to choose between a personal need and that of a group, often sacrificing one for the other. Many factors play a role in whether people choose to cooperate or to compete, but time constraint and other time-related variables might be decisive in this decision-making process. This study investigated the role of these time variables in individuals’ choice to cooperate or compete, specifically by evaluating time pressure and the individuals’ worldview of time (i.e. how they perceive and think about their present and future). Participants (n = 220) took part in 10 rounds of a social dilemma task (the chicken game), either in a condition with time pressure or a control condition. Participants also completed the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, and the Cooperative-Competitive Orientation Scale. As expected, rates of competition were higher in the experimental condition, where a 40-second timer was set after the fifth round of the dilemma. In fact, more competitive behavior was observed with each successive round in the time-pressure condition, with the last round consistently being the most competitive. Present and future components of the time perspective variable were positively correlated with competitive behavior, but only when under time pressure. No effect was found using the cooperation and competition attitudes measure. These results suggest that time pressure increases competitive behaviors, and that time perspective is related to competition only when there is an explicit time constraint in the decision process.
The text explores the functionality of the notion of a wild card event as a means to articulate uncertainty and incorporate it in the performance of various realms of human activity. It starts by examining some common narrative modalities through which uncertainty is being approached. The second section illustrates how the notion of a wild card event fits those modalities and how scanning for wild cards serves as an anticipatory strategy to compensate for certain lack of experience, ignorance and insufficient knowledge and as a very specific technique for temporal adjustment. The third section demonstrates its applicability, influential presence and productivity (including profitability) in three realms – futures studies, the market and politics.
In an interview study among 25 architects we investigated how activities were allocated over time in the design phase of an architectural project. Specifically, linking the literatures about pacing behavior and incubation, we set out to identify patterns related to how the interviewees paced their activity before a deadline. We used two types of materials to stimulate the answers in the interview: 1) standard graphs, developed in previous research; 2) a timeline. Five main themes emerged, that were termed pacing; milestones; multiple projects; deadlines; and quality–time trade-offs. Based upon the results we propose a model that includes overlapping U-shapes of activity, that is, most activity at the start of a project and right before a deadline. A second study provided a comparison of the pacing patterns among 85 respondents in jobs that required different levels of creativity. Not only U-shape pacing, but also deadline pacing was more common in creative jobs, whereas early starting patterns were less common. The two studies provide insight into how professionals in creative jobs deliberately use pacing that allows for incubation.
This paper enquires into the history of clock-time through a critical engagement with Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift’s Shaping the Day. The paper delineates the contours of an approach to the history of clock-time based on an analysis of the parallelism between the historical trajectories of clock-time and market relations. This approach is presented through a four-fold critical engagement with Glennie and Thrift's book assessing theoretical shortcomings, definitional problems, normative commitments and historical method.
My aim in this paper is to extend the general critique of academic capitalism to the changes in the nature of academic work time it is bringing about. I will argue that university teaching and research requires an open-ended structure of time free from externally imposed routines and deadlines. I call this structure of time ‘thought-time’ to emphasise its intrinsic connection to the way in which ideas develop in the mind and objectified in social life. Thought-time is incompatible with the structure of what I will call ‘money-time’. Money time is the structure of time required by capitalist markets. Its structure is determined by the generic goal of productivity – maximum output for minimum input of resources, labour, and time. Hence money-time structures human activity by forces without regard to the content and goal of the activity considered in itself – the precisely measured sequences, routines, and deadlines are calibrated to ensure the production of as much money-value profit as possible, and not the free development and elaboration of ideas in the open-ended processes characteristic of thought-time. This temporal restructuring of academic labour has especially pernicious effects in those areas of academic research, especially the humanities and social sciences, which are not amenable to the creation of commodifiable research. Hence, the progressive subordination of thought-time to money-time is a serious challenge to the future health of these disciplines.
The article gives an account of various disturbed experiences of time from a phenomenological perspective. The author distinguishes three levels for addressing variations of temporal experience—the temporal structure of consciousness itself, the actual experience of time, and the sociopolitical temporality. He excludes the psychological type of argument, exemplified by Philip Zimbardo’s Time Perspective Inventory and concentrates on disorders in which the temporal structure of consciousness is itself altered. The clinical examples of disturbed temporalities being investigated come from studies of two influential, 20th-century German phenomenological psychiatrists: Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966) and Viktor Emil von Gebsattel (1883–1974) and include mania, phobia, schizophrenia, depression, and addiction. Philosophical examples come from Hannah Arendt’s "The Life of the Mind." It is argued that not all disturbed experiences of time related to mental disorders are pathological, but that we can distinguish such experiences from their less severe varieties by appealing to the value-free norm of primordial temporality. A psychotic experience of internal time of the self coming to a standstill exemplifies such a pathological situation, in which temporal experience is not only altered, but ruined.
Institutional change is a response to socioeconomic pressures caused by resource scarcity, population growth, cultural change, and economic inefficiency. Historical evidence shows that the unequitable resource redistribution among groups caused by institutional change can indirectly reduce income, particularly when it leads to civil conflicts. A more equitable and effective approach to institutional change would seek win–win solutions. To examine this possibility, I review historical examples of institutional change in China to show how gradual institutional change that lets all stakeholders share the economic benefits is the most successful path. Therefore, innovation to replace or modify old institutions and equitably increase economic growth will be a key approach. This win–win approach requires persuasion, compromise, demonstration projects, competition, and embracing institutional diversity. Increased economic benefits come from economic innovation and encouragement of stakeholders to participate in institutional change, but require nurturing of new social groups that will drive the change process.
Although we all live in the present and often hear about the importance of living "here and now", every moment of our lives is highly influenced by explicit and implicit thoughts about our past and potential future. The present study investigated the relation between individuals' tendencies to either drift towards the past by, e.g. constantly re-evaluating and regretting past choices, towards the future by, e.g. basing present actions on anticipated future consequences, and their inclination to deal with the present by either committing to chosen alternatives or procrastinating on their implementation. Finally, the influence of these factors on participants' satisfaction with their chosen college major was also explored. The obtained results indicate a close relationship between the assessed considerations of different temporal directions. Furthermore, regret, procrastination, commitment (choice closure), and consideration of future consequences (future focus) were revealed as statistically significant predictors of students' satisfaction with their college major. These findings indicate that individuals' considerations of various temporal directions influence their valuation of own choices and life outcomes and open new questions regarding the general relevance and effects of mental time travel.
The purpose of this paper is to outline the "ecology of social time" as an empirical concept of time to bridge the gap between theory and empirical research in the sociology of time. First, this paper proposes that social time could be considered as an institutionalized referential mechanism that enables social interactions to occur at a specific time point by coordinating the social actions of various agents. Examining the condition of temporal coordination and diagnosing its fairness critically may be the tasks involved in the sociology of time. Second, this paper suggests that the ecology of social time is a useful concept for integrating the theses and tasks applied in the sociology of time. Finally, this paper presents an ecological model of social time as a possible framework for subsequent empirical research in the sociology of time.
Although social cognitive career theory has been tested in relation to Holland’s RIASEC types, few studies have examined the role of time perspective across RIASEC themes. Four hundred and thirty-five students participated in this study. Data were collected on the time perspective dimensions, learning experiences, self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and interests across each of the RIASEC areas identified by Holland. The findings, besides a substantial confirmation of SCCT foreknown causal relationships, indicated a significant role of present-hedonistic and future temporal perspectives in Investigative and Social areas. The results evidenced the role of time perspective among persons’ inputs influencing self-efficacy and outcome expectations in the social cognitive framework of interests’ formation.
This study explores the meanings that substance-abusing clients attach to weekend during motivational counseling sessions in Finnish Probation Service. By applying Peirce's semiotic theory of signs, this article studies "weekend" as a symbolic sign, and analyzes: (a) What kind of meanings the clients attach to it? (b) What does weekend mean to the clients' motivation to change? The analyses are based on videotaped and transcribed data consisting of 98 motivational counseling sessions. The results of the study display that the general meaning of weekend is constructed as an obstacle to change. Weekend stands for an excuse to drink, a need to drink, a desire to drink and incapability to change in the clients' talk. The results show that by applying the semiotic approach new and significant meaning constellations can be found in the client's change relevant talk during motivational counseling.
This text attempts to examine the structuring of the urban environment, taking into account the geographically traditional spatial aspects of various phenomena as well as their temporal characteristics. Places are anchored in time and time in turn may be said to unfold in space. It is thus impossible to achieve an understanding of space without the necessary temporal dimension; indeed, the debate over the conceptualization of timespace has gained considerable currency in the social sciences. This text forms a response to this point of interest, providing a discussion of the chronotopic approach. The first part examines the concept of time and timespace, respectively, in the social sciences; particular attention is paid to the non-trivial aspects of the relationship between time and space. The abovementioned chronotope analytical and interpretive model is utilized throughout. For the purposes of this article, the model is defined as a specific part of the urban space defined by a unique temporality, i.e. based on a specific combination of overlapping rhythms. Such an approach opens up the possibility of regionalization on the basis of a specific temporality on different spatial scales. The empirical part of the text attempts to characterize the differentiation of urban space in Brno on the basis of a spectral analysis of three selected rhythms – the work cycle of a given locale, average duration of shopping session and public transport frequency. Model cases of selected urban chronotopes are subsequently developed on the basis of the rhythmicity of these activities.
This paper reports on the results of a commissioned scoping study that explored the extent of research available on time and community. Using a range of techniques designed to provide a rapid overview of this relatively indistinct research area, 885 studies were identified for inclusion in the study. Importantly, only 85 of these were identified as ‘highly relevant’ to the study’s focus. An analysis of these articles revealed 11 core themes in work on time and community. Two cross-cutting themes that arose from the full range of included studies were then selected for further analysis. These were the role of time in inclusion and exclusion and ‘critical temporalities’, that is, work that develops critical temporal responses as part of addressing social inequalities. This broader analysis suggested three overarching concerns shared by both cross-cutting themes: past, present and future; continuity and discontinuity; and multiple rhythms of time use. After exploring how these concerns are addressed in the literature, the paper concludes with an outline of the gaps in research on time and community, as well as recommendations for further research.
Though the concept of time is fuzzily defined in education, it embraces many key teaching and learning aspects of the educational situation from scheduling (at the macro, meso, and micro level) through certification (i.e., credit requirements). It is also one of the determining factors within institutions for distance learning where education is almost always time and place independent and where learners and/or institutions make use of online and/or e-learning. Strangely, while these temporal aspects of teaching and learning are extremely important, the time-factor has not received much attention in educational research. This is especially strange since "lack of time" and "out of sync" are two of the most common complaints heard from learners in online educational settings. Thus, educational practice misses adequate research on an important aspect that can improve education/learning in general and online/e-learning in particular. To better understand how research deals with "time" as a factor in learning and education, a systematic literature analysis of articles relating to "time" was carried out in a high-impact SSCI journal on education and educational technology. A total of 966 articles across a period of 11 years was analyzed for the presence of "time" as a factor in the research published. The most important result of this literature analysis was that "time" played almost no role as a variable in research on education and educational technology.
Why does China, geographically the third largest country in the world, have only one time zone, while Australia, nearly as big, has six? Concentrating on the Chinese case, we argue that control over time zones represents an example of "symbolic centralization," the degree to which the central state concentrates intangible or symbolic resources that reinforce and assert state control, often invisibly, over people's everyday lives. Few state actions shape citizens' quotidian experience as fundamentally as symbolic action like setting the boundaries of time, yet political scientists have generally elided the implications of temporal authority. And those few scholars who discuss symbolic power in a systematic way have not considered how its degree of concentration varies cross-nationally. Symbolic centralization provides insights into how a distant political center may continue to shape fundamental aspects of daily life even while scoring low on resource-oriented quantitative measures of centralism. Using qualitative data and introducing a new quantitative "symbolic centralization" index, this article disaggregates the concept from the more commonly studied fiscal and political centralization through evidence from both conventional and anomalous cases.
This article explores how discourses of time are produced and negotiated in professional client interaction when making mental health rehabilitation plans. The discourse of linear time is dominant in interaction and shared by both participants to create joint future talk. However, the clients might challenge the dominant time talk by using the discourse of the time of mindful body (Fahlgren, 2009), resulting in clashing time talk. The discourses of time are linked with identity categorisation and with the criteria of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ professional work and clienthood. The analysis demonstrates the relevancy and consequentiality of time talk in professional client interaction.
It is relatively uncontroversial to say that increasing workload, speed of change and the feeling that life is getting faster negatively impact on the academic profession. Drawing from primary data and secondary analyses, this article, nonetheless, highlights the specific ambivalence that emerges from investigations of time experience in contemporary academia. The argument presented here distinguishes between dominant oppressive acceleration with adverse implications and subtle, yet non-negligible, energizing accelerative moments. In the first instance, I explore how the increasing inability to determine one’s own temporal rhythm results in increasingly reported feelings of guilt. These feelings are, moreover, exacerbated by the currently ubiquitous doctrine of ‘excellence’, which has specific temporal connotations. Second, reflecting on phenomenological aspects of research conduct – a constitutive academic activity – I track the positive attributes of enabling acceleration as integral components of academic lifeworld. In this, I differ from the existing accounts analysing academic life in the fast lane, which unreservedly define acceleration in unfavourable terms, and yet in no way do I underestimate the seriousness of the negative consequences of rush, hurry and intensified workload for the scholarly profession. Broaching acceleration as a variegated experience, I conclude by outlining the inclusive conception of unhasty time and stress the need for its political enactment in higher education policy.
The present article reports on the relationship between various, physiological and sociological factors on a person’s individual perception of time in life. Specifically, 200 participants (100 males, 100 females) were solicited from diverse, university-centered communities. These volunteers completed a series of questionnaire-based evaluations and also had physiological recordings of heart rate and core temperature taken. For the measure of time-in-life we used an amended version of the Lines test which compared the individual’s perception of their current time-in-life against the actuarial expectation of their lifespan. Results confirmed a strong inverse relationship between and individual’s age and this measure of perceived life duration. The gender of the individual had an important impact on their perceived lifespan. There were also indications of differences contingent upon the time of day at which the test was administered. However, there was little evidence of any linkage between lifespan perception and the physiological indicators recorded. The results are discussed in terms of possible cognitive and sociological determinants of individual’s perception of their present life location.
Against the background of unprecedented international migration, it is not clear how people’s transnational mobility and ties have intersected with the temporalities associated with places or spaces. Drawing on the data from an empirical study of the caregiving experiences of Chinese grandparents in Canada, this case study reveals the simultaneous, yet uneven, temporal impacts of transnational care on individual, familial, and transnational levels. Although the coexistence of multiple temporalities enables Chinese skilled immigrant families to mobilize care resources across generations and nation-states, the dominance of the neoliberal temporal framework also means various consequences of such transnational ‘flexibility’. I argue that rethinking transnational care from a temporal perspective helps us identify the linkages, discrepancies and contradictions between ‘global time’ and peripheral temporalities and between time and space, and thus makes visible the inequalities – in particular, the temporal inequalities – embedded in human migration and social relations on a transnational scale.
Healthy sleep habits include sufficient sleep, regular bedtimes and established sleep routines. The responsibilities of paid and unpaid work that arise during the daytime are assumed to haunt us at night as well, eventually affecting these sleep habits. A long-term comparison of sleep duration from 1966 and 1999 time-diary data shows that sleep duration has not declined to the large extent that is generally assumed. Moreover, analyses of timing of sleep and sleep routines using time-diary data from 1999 and 2004 also do not show much evidence of this assumed decline. On the contrary, increasing work and family responsibilities positively affect regular bedtimes and sleep routines.
Against the background of unprecedented international migration, it is not clear how people’s transnational mobility and ties have intersected with the temporalities associated with places or spaces. Drawing on the data from an empirical study of the caregiving experiences of Chinese grandparents in Canada, this case study reveals the simultaneous, yet uneven, temporal impacts of transnational care on individual, familial and transnational levels. Although the coexistence of multiple temporalities enables Chinese skilled immigrant families to mobilize care resources across generations and nation-states, the dominance of the neoliberal temporal framework also leads to various consequences of such transnational ‘flexibility’. I argue that rethinking transnational care from a temporal perspective helps us to identify the linkages, discrepancies and contradictions between ‘global time’ and peripheral temporalities, and between time and space, and thus makes visible the inequalities – in particular, the temporal inequalities – embedded in human migration and social relations on a transnational scale.
The recent economic crisis (2008–2011) is coupled with a political crisis as well. This is due to a shift of the financial risk to political risk; the markets seem to press the democratic governments to risk their own social capital so that the former reduce the investment risk. The ability of the markets to achieve such a goal is realized by the global dependence on information and communication technology (ICT) networks that squeeze the time of interactions between the markets and the governments, thus causing a profound problem in the operations of democracies. This paper inspects those phenomena as manifestations of globalization and tries to examine certain solutions to those problems, from a systems theoretical perspective.
This article examines a number of critical-theoretical, utopian alternatives to the dominant temporal conception of ‘homogeneous empty time’. It explores the ways in which difference is theorized within the field of time, and the ways in which relations to the past and future can be constructed non-sequentially. It focuses on four related theories. Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return is shown to be inspired by a critique of backward-looking views of time and an orientation to an abundance of the present. Benjamin’s theory of messianic time combines the immediacy of ‘now-time’ with a non-successive connection to past and future times. Deleuze’s Bergsonian view of time suggests the simultaneity of the past with the present, and the possibility of constructing connections between different zones of time and actualizing these zones in the present. Agamben’s theory of temporal play focuses on immediacy, the redemption of the past, and the abandonment of the mastery of history. Each of these theories is discussed in terms of its own conception of time, its difference from dominant conceptions of time, and its relationship to utopia. While offering four distinct alternatives, the theorists all critique alienated and objectivist views of time, and offer different varieties of temporal rhizomatics and polyphony. The juxtaposition of these theories provides the underpinnings for temporal utopianism as a new field of study. The idea of temporal utopianism demonstrates that utopia can be a temporal as well as a spatial phenomenon, and that the experience of time characteristic of capitalist modernity is contingent rather than necessary. It thus points towards a rupture with the sense of closure generated by dominant conceptions of time, creating temporal zones in which utopian spaces can be actualized.
Within Western contemporary social thought, the claim that social acceleration is a key feature of the late-modern world has been widely circulated. A criticism of this argument is that it is often based on conjecture and hyperbole instead of on actual empirical evidence (Rosa and Scheuerman, 2009; Wajcman, 2008). A viable way to subject the social acceleration argument to a higher degree of empirical scrutiny is to deploy the sociological study of sleep as a key indicator. Such an insight builds upon research in the nascent sociological study of sleep, which has established how some developments in people’s sleep lives may signal broader shifts in the socio-temporal order (e.g. Baxter and Kroll-Smith, 2005; Melbin, 1987; Williams, 2005, 2011). I contribute to this emerging body of literature by emphasizing the importance of being sufficiently precise and nuanced when sleep research is deployed as a measure of the social acceleration phenomenon. I appeal to Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration (2003) as a way to advance a more explicit, multi-faceted and open-ended understanding of the social acceleration concept. Rosa’s theory is unique because it identifies three distinct facets of the concept that can be empirically grounded. By undertaking an exploratory study of what evidence regarding people’s sleep lives can be used to test these three facets, I find that this yields a more discontinuous and context-driven view of social acceleration.
If there is more than one time, what is a time and how do they relate to each other? I argue that times order something more basic that we may call temporality. Temporality involves more than past, present, and future; it includes duration, access, inevitability, and much more. Times are social efforts to translate operations of temporality into meaningful codes and organize their material influence. Times relate primarily by translation and material influence. One reinforcing set has emerged that reifies a simple notion of time that makes it difficult to imagine other times. This is starting to change.
This article departs from the view in which ignorance is seen as necessarily detrimental and analyses how specified ignorance (here called ‘nonknowledge’) can even serve as a productive resource. By using the example of cleaning up contaminated land in a timely and effective manner, it is argued that nonknowledge is a useful resource; in some instances, on a par with knowledge in its importance. The article discusses some of the strategies used to cope with ongoing situations involving ignorance in the remediation of areas containing multiple contaminant sources and plumes. Analysis of these processes indicates that planning and policymaking may benefit when limits to knowledge are openly acknowledged.
The terms habit and routine have come to be used with increasing frequency in debates about ‘behaviour’ change and sustainable consumption, where dominant approaches, dubbed as ‘portfolio models of action’ by their critics, employ these terms to capture human deficiencies in the translation of pro-environmental values into corresponding actions (the ‘value–action’ gap). Alternative approaches present habits and routines as the observable performances of stable practices. Informed by these approaches, this article makes three ‘conceptual moves’ in order to demonstrate the need for empirical attention to the temporal conditioning of everyday practices. First, it is argued that conceptual usages of the terms ‘habit’ and ‘routine’ are often imprecise and used generically to capture many different aspects of human action. A threefold conceptual framework comprising of ‘dispositions’, ‘procedures’ and ‘sequences’ is proposed as a preliminary step in dealing with this problem. Second, it is suggested that generic uses of the terms ‘habit’ and ‘routine’ imply multiple forms of temporality. Again, as a conceptual sorting exercise, three categories of temporality pertinent to understanding the performance of practices are examined: time as a resource; the temporal demands of practices; and temporal rhythms. Third, the relationships between the conceptual variants of habitual and routine actions and temporalities of practices are examined through reference to empirical research. In conclusion, it is argued that reducing habits and routines to generic descriptions of behaviour within portfolio models of action is inadequate for developing understandings of the reproduction of everyday practices. Rather, empirical and conceptual attention to the relationships between practices, temporalities and different forms of action are required if the challenge of fostering more sustainable ways of life is to be met.
Realizing narratives render projected futures knowable as real. Projected futures are intrinsic to forming identity and informing motives. Endtime is a future situated at a critical rupture, an ‘end’ of a world as we know it within a culturally expected duration. Some prophetic versions provide realizing narratives of endtime as a context for identity that combines expectation and emotion into powerful motivational accounts for believers. Such religious narratives may suggest different futures for believers and non-believers. A pragmatic narrative illustrated by backcasting from preferred futures to present actions suggests that a normative task for contemporary selves is choosing among realizing narratives. A pragmatic turn offers criteria for making future-implicating choices and fashioning a cosmopolitan identity.
Through its moving frontiers, the ideology of sustainability prescribes or challenges orderings in the imaginary of societies. Accordingly, sustainability leads to obvious struggles between different systems of representations worldwide, and temporal orderliness is at the core of these battles. In this article, I focus on the future. Domesticating the future by sustainability is a central element, in particular, of the cultural confrontation between the ‘West and the Rest’. Moreover, the ideology of sustainability proves to be self-contradictory: on one side promotes cultural diversity, but on the other side operates only under a singular and homogeneous construct of the future.