In the period 2014–2019, the Dutch authorities governed the duration of asylum procedures in order to control the influx of asylum seekers. They prioritised and accelerated cases with poor chances of success, while they deprioritised cases with good chances of success. This resulted in long asylum procedures for asylum seekers with a likelihood of success and short asylum procedures for those with

Ever since Georg Simmel (1895) introduced the notion into sociological accounts of modernity, scholars have tried to empirically test the claim of an increasing “speed of life” in modern society. The acceleration of speed or pace of life has been characterized as an “intensification” of our experience of time, a “time squeeze,” and “hurriedness” in leisure time. However, to date, no comprehensive instrument

This article seeks to materialize social theories of modern temporalities. It proposes a tempo-material analysis of carbon resources like coal, oil, and gas to illuminate how fossil materialities both underpin and undermine modern temporalities and introduce the notion of fossil modernity to evoke an understanding of the modern composed of multiple conflicting modes of material temporality. Fossil

The creation of Finland as a grand duchy within the Russian Empire in 1809 opened up the question of what Finland was, in fact. Comparing Finland synchronously with other countries and diachronically with itself before and after its elevation into a grand duchy gained temporal features in which its level of development was assessed. Such temporal comparisons during the first half of the 19th century

The comparison of the present to the time of the Prophet could mean very different things at different times and for different people, in spite of the finite authoritative sources, the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet. The article argues that the time of the Prophet and the comparative standard it offered not only changed depending on the concerns of the present from which the authors wrote

The experience of a lack of time due to an increasing burden of urgent tasks is one of the more common challenges created by digital communication media in the network society. This study develops the concept of chronemic urgency to explore urgent messaging using digital media. Chronemic urgency is the urgency users assign to messages received via a specific communication medium. Consistent with a

This article analyses how long-term unemployed persons experience time during their unemployment trajectories. This article uses a combination of interviewing and participant drawings to study the experience of time passing during the unemployment trajectory. We focus on the experience of wait time and find that the wait experience varies with control: some clients experience temporal agency and others

This article focuses on the topic of the young adult’s cleft habitus influenced by a housing affordability crisis in the Czech Republic and examines how this situation affects the young adult’s relation to the imagination of a temporally structured life course and synchronization of life spheres (housing, family, and work). This article is based on qualitative in-depth interviews conducted in the four

Addressing past and present injustices in order to create more just futures is the central premise of most social movements. How activists conceptualise and relate to time affects1 how they articulate their vision, the actions they take and how they imagine intergenerational justice. Two social movements for change are emblematic of different relationships with time: the struggle to resolve and repair

A not uncommon news-media feature in 2020 was the rendering—by deadline-driven sub-editors, by weary journalists and not-reflective-enough essayists of every kind—of the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Titles with ‘the time of pandemic’ somewhere in it became numerous, and the slightly more adventurous ‘Quarentime' emerged as a portmanteau.

This article engages the politics of technology as it examines how a discourse of time is framed by engineers and project principals in the course of the development of three future internet architecture projects: named data networking, eXpressive Internet Architecture, and Mobility First. This framing reveals categories of a discourse of time that include articulations of efficiency, speed, time as

More than any other institution, the museum is preoccupied with time, perpetually creating, contesting, and regaining it. From the collections of ancient art amassed in mid-14th-century Italy to the contemporary galleries without their own collections, the museum has always been a leading force in shaping Western civilization’s perceptions of time. After a survey of the history of Europe’s museums

In Romania, as elsewhere, there is persistent controversy surrounding homeopathy wherein various parties try to draw the boundaries of legitimate medical practice. The literature on complementary and alternative medicine features little discussion on the temporal dimensions of controversies surrounding these therapies, focusing mainly on the temporalities of the lived experience of treatment. Yet time

This article makes a significant empirical contribution to our understanding of why people in the United Kingdom without childcare responsibilities actively reduce or limit the amount of time they spend in paid employment. We show how the negative aspects of employment (push factors) and the desire to spend time in more varied and enjoyable ways (pull factors) interact to produce decisions to enact

What do birthdays mean? Why are they so obligatory for modern people? Based on neo-Durkheimian perspectives on ritual, this article suggests the anthropological history of the western birthday as a key to understand its meaning. The article points at the unique ritual system developed by modern industrial culture, such as birthdays, jubilees, and other anniversaries—designated here as Rites of Temporality—which

Noonan J (2016) Thought-time, money-time and the conditions of free academic labour. Time & Society 25(2): 213–233.

Waiting time is an exercise of power. When citizens such as welfare clients, asylum seekers, or inmates encounter the state, they experience lengthy waiting time. Their cases are often delayed; their appointments are postponed or canceled. This creates uncertainty, and studies on the lived experiences of waiting time show that this makes citizens accept that they have to wait. In this study, I argue

A considerable attention has been given recently to the analysis of the temporal dimension(s) of science and the impact of the changes therein on scientific work. One of the questions that has emerged from the rapidly growing discussion is whether and (if so) how these changes affect not only the general structural aspects of scientific practice but also the very content of scientific knowledge. In

How people balance work and personal or family life has been widely examined, showing gender inequalities that put women at a disadvantage relative to men. However, although this is a question of time compatibility, there has been no research on whether the type of working day (continuous or split) has different effects on this balance for men and women. The Time Use Survey enables us to examine this

Despite the increasing participation of midlife women in sports, and biomedical and consumerist discourses encouraging physical activity, research on intersections of age, gender, and the body in sports is lacking or fragmentary. Based on in-depth interviews with Israeli women aged 40–60 years participating in marathons, ultramarathons, and triathlons, we explore how they experience their participation

The main purpose of this article is to raise some questions about temporal comparisons and analogies in the writing of history. The article has four parts. The first one shows that historical discipline, conceptual history and language itself can scarcely be conceived of in the absence of comparisons, implicit or explicit, between events, processes and individuals. The second section provides a few

This article focuses on the concept of ‘time collapse’ commonly used within scholarship on digital memory. Despite its intuitive appeal, I claim that the notion of a collapsed time leaves considerable room for conceptual ambiguity, which in turn hampers a deeper ethical analysis of the topic. In view of this ambiguity, the present article sets out to provide analytical rigor to, and thus unpack the

This article situates media engagement as an under-examined form of knowledge work, offering a nuanced discussion of the temporalities of media work from the perspective of expert sources and contributors. Using in-depth interviews with expert women in Canada, we focus on the temporality of media engagement to understand the complexities of this labour—that it is often unpaid, ad hoc, and contingent

While temporality has been addressed in the context of child welfare, the temporal dimensions of differentiation and othering remain unacknowledged. This article draws on material from a Swedish child welfare agency and is theoretically inspired by postcolonial and queer theories and critical childhood studies. It is based on an analytical juxtaposition of care order applications recommending immediate

Since 1972 a leap second has been introduced into global time standardization systems, due to the discrepancy between Coordinated Universal Time and International Atomic Time. Until recently, the leap second has been a consensual, if mildly uncanny adjustment, a para-governmental temporal wobble. Google's explanation of its actions with regard to the insertion of a leap second smeared into its Network

It is difficult to write reflectively without the writing itself being stamped by its time-space context. We write in the context of an almost global lockdown; the political imposition--for that is what it is--of what the State of California more mellifluously calls ‘shelter-in-place’. In their homes, many are now writing the first drafts of a new context for subjective temporal reflection. In blogs

Bastian, M., Baraitser, L., Flexer, M. J., Hom, A. R., & Salisbury, L. (2020). Introduction: The social life of time. Time & Society, 29(2), 289–296. DOI: 10.1177/0961463X20921674

While Michel Foucault is commonly considered as a thinker with a primary interest in space and spatiality, his use of temporal categories, tropes and metaphors has until recently been only partially reconstructed. Working through different phases of his writings and lectures, this paper argues that Foucault opened a complex and interesting – yet to be acknowledged – analytical perspective on historically

There is broad agreement that the need to decarbonise and make better use of renewable and more intermittent sources of power will require increased flexibility in energy systems. However, organisations involved in the energy sector work with very different interpretations of what this might involve. In describing how the notion of flexibility is reified, commodified, and operationalised in sometimes

This paper reads Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time as stories of deictic temporal crises. It critically examines the texts, exploring their representations of mental time travel (MTT), and places them into dialectic with health sciences research on autonoesis and episodic memory deficits in people with lived experience of mental health disorders, particularly psychosis

Like many other countries, Australian government policy focuses on extending working life as a response to concern about the cost of an ageing population. In this article, we focus on older aged care workers and highlight how poor employment conditions hinder their capacity to work in later life. Many of these workers are at risk of time and income poverty, since they are on low wage, part-time, low-hour

This article asks: What is, sociologically speaking, a beginning? And why has sociology so relatively little to say about beginnings, that point of discontinuity between past meaning and future meaning? We answer these questions in four successive steps. First, we suggest that the existing literature on beginnings can be organized in light of Lévi-Strauss’ distinction between the irreversible time

Mobile digital communications, as currently the most complex forms of communication, offer a broad view on the phenomenon of communication. The last ten years have seen the addition of new forms of communication (WhatsApp, Facebook, etc.) and the restructuring of a (growing?) share of traditional communication into digitalized forms. Taking these changes as a guideline, this article examines the concept