This article deals with the role of time in causal models in the social sciences. The aim is to underline the importance of time-sensitive causal models, in contrast to time-free models. The relation between time and causality is important, though a complex one, as the debates in the philosophy of science show. In particular, an outstanding issue is whether one can derive causal ordering from time

This introduction describes the main themes of the special issue on temporal comparisons. It provides the background for individual contributions by sketching the way in which evaluations are intrinsic to conceptions of historical time. Inasmuch as different configurations of the relationship between past, present and future imply temporal comparisons between ‘now’ and ‘then’, historical time is subject

The connection between time and power has been studied extensively. A common strategy through which street-level bureaucrats exert power and dominance over their clients consists of imposing protracted waiting and maintaining uncertainty regarding the outcomes of waiting. In this study, I argue that another facet of power in organizations is related to the temporal typification of cases. By exploring

This article investigates how evidence of the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines is enacted in news media via a focus on the temporality of vaccine development. We argue that time constitutes a crucial object of and mechanism for knowledge production in such media and investigate how time comes to matter in vaccine evidence-making communication practices. In science communication on vaccine development

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has majorly disrupted many aspects of people’s lives, provoking psychosocial distress among students. People’s positive and negative attitudes towards the past, present and future were a dispositional pre–COVID-19 reality. Faced with a pandemic, people have reported disruptions in the speed of passing time. People can shift their attention more towards the past, present

This article aims to demonstrate that the transition from the mainstream narrative to the interactional history of concepts promises tangible benefits for scholars of social time in general and temporal comparisons in particular. It is shown that the traditionally close alignment of narration with the production of historical consciousness at various levels hinders the study of time as a semantic variable

Comparisons across historical times can appear in various shapes. Apart from simple then/now contrasts, three basic modalities may be distinguished: (1) Comparisons that stress similarity and repeatability (“once again”), (2) comparisons that claim absolute novelty, if not incommensurability between present and past (“never before”), and (3) comparisons that suggest a time lag between two entities

This article, drawn from an ethnography of a rural farming co-operative in the East of England, argues that the temporal experience of the digital is one of a-temporality rather than acceleration. In using the term a-temporality, the article is elaborating on a concept briefly discussed by Mark Fisher to denote an alienation from time, combining it with Natasha Dow Schull’s writings on casino capitalism

Zygmunt Bauman addressed spatiotemporal compression as a critical aspect of the transition from solid to liquid modernity. In this transition, speed and flexibility came to define the conditions of social life which no longer relied on spatiotemporal separation as the basis of all power relations. But digitization of these conditions raises the question of whether the present phase of modernity depicts

In the most general sense, the modern idea of history is a conceptual tool deployed in order to domesticate experienced novelty and expectations of the future. In Western modernity, the operation we usually call historicization has been nothing other than an operation of temporal domestication: the integration of experienced and expected novelty into a larger processual scheme we associate with modern

The aim of this study is to interpret recent developments in the field of adult education in the Czech Republic through the theory of social acceleration. The study is designed as focused ethnography, drawing upon observation, interviewing, and document analysis. The material is read through the concepts of acceleration and frenetic standstill and contextualized in the discourses on industry 4.0 and

The multiple nature of time has by now been well established across a wide range of scholarly traditions in the humanities and social sciences. The article takes that insight as a starting point, in order to discuss the tools, work, sites and contestations involved in common temporal frameworks and structures that cross and join together time’s multiplicities. We thus articulate and discuss key components

This article examines how the discourse of the new generation of environmental youth movements highlights time and temporality in order to explain the possibilities of change that the movements offer. This is done by analyzing three influential and transnational youth climate movements—Earth Uprising, Extinction Rebellion, and Fridays For Future—in relation to three influential diagnoses of the current

Global health development projects are inherently governed by bounded, temporal and linear time frames: the initiation, implementation and ending of time-limited interventions. This projectification of global health programmes has wide-reaching consequences as global health projects, often unsustainable and produces both new life possibilities and uncertain futures. This article highlights the temporal

In this article, we examine and discuss observations on projectification from organizational and management studies and contextualize them with recent insights from the discourse around social acceleration. Against the backdrop of these debates, we ethnographically inquire into project work strategies in fusion research. First, we briefly survey existing scholarship that interrogates acceleration and

The sociopolitical landscape for queer people has changed dramatically in recent decades; however, progress has been both halting and uneven. While this is evident in many areas of professional and private life, this study focuses on the experiences of queer students in STEM learning environments in US colleges and universities. Specifically, we explore student expressions of temporality and futurity

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 th...

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 a...

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 ...

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...

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 emer...

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 disci...

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

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

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

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

In recent social science literatures, a focus on the “social life” of something suggests an interest in foregrounding the active capacities of what has traditionally been thought of as inert. Approaches drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s framework (1988) look to follow the movement of things such as an object, a device, or a method, through its everyday manifestations in order to understand how it takes

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

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

A common myth about families living in homeless shelters is that they are laconically and contentedly waiting around for housing, financial support through welfare or jobs, and other resources and services. Nothing could be further from the truth. Single parents in shelters dealing with inequities incurred by poverty are busy trying to procure housing, jobs, and other resources while managing children’s

What employee with the right to choose their own working hours has not felt the silent weight of critical reproach from their colleagues or their boss when they arrive later than most at work? Although this is a form of social control that seems widespread in the world of French flexitime, it is a subject that has so far received very little scholarly attention in research on day-to-day temporalities

When thinking about time and migration, time appears to be the obvious unchangeable independent variable—linear, uniform, and constant—affecting migrants’ experiences. However, what if we reimagine time as a dependent variable affected by migration? Time, thus, is not linear but layered, malleable, and potentially even liquid. Migrants weave time with space, generating past, present, and future, forming

Early diagnosis and rapid treatment are deemed essential in relation to cancer. In 2007, Denmark implemented accelerated cancer patient pathways with predetermined time frames to reduce waiting time. In this article, based on fieldwork with observations at two hospitals and ethnographic interviews, we examine temporal experiences of the cancer patient pathway for endometrial cancer of the uterus at

Scholars and political observers have noted how the rate of significant events and crises in the Trump administration appear to be accelerating at an unmanageable and irresistible pace, making it difficult to respond to these actions as they happen. This paper uses the lens of the present as a frame for exploring the temporal assumptions and “timing mechanisms” at work in the contemporary moment within

This paper contributes to work on the social life of time. It focuses on how time is doubled; produced by, and productive of, the relations and processes it operates through. In particular, it explores the methodological implications of this conception of time for how social scientists may study the doubledness of time. It draws on an allied move within the social sciences to see methods as themselves

This article explores the relationship between gender inequality and the tempo of life around the world. By directly situating tempo in sociological theory, I develop a more consistent, embodied, precise and generalizable measure for the tempo of public life, with gender on the forefront. To do so, I draw on the largest dataset to-date collected on the tempo of life around the world. This allows me

The Goetheviertel is the poorest district of Germany’s poorest city, the postindustrial harbour city of Bremerhaven. However, for many local inhabitants it is also the city’s most beautiful district with its 19th century architecture and central location, and any visitor of Bremerhaven would agree: this district is ripe for gentrification. Gentrification has been anticipated for the district at least

Epilepsy is a neurological condition defined by time; it is characterized by a lifelong tendency for recurrent, unpredictable, and unprovoked seizures, during which people lose control over parts of body-mind function. Diagnosing seizures involves using electroencephalograms to represent and classify brain waves in relation to clock time. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in a North American teaching

This paper begins with a general discussion of chronopolitics and how I intend to apply the term in connection with Eviatar Zerubavel’s “time maps,” using familiar religious and secular examples to illustrate the concept. Then, drawing on recent philosophical and historical work on race and racism, I argue for political “racial” times, albeit of contested periodizations. The uncontroversially racialized