Social Space-Time: On the Concept of Social Space-Time and Its Empirical Relevance to Biography

Abstract

Attempts to reconcile space and time from a social-science perspective have recently become more common. This article goes about this task by developing a workable concept of social space-time, focusing on the connections between historicity—the relationship of the past, present, and future as it is constructed in the social sphere—and social constitutions of space such as the home or the nation-state. In the context of an exploratory study within the area of biographic constructions, this article draws upon twenty-four biographical-narrative interviews to reconstruct constitutions of time and space. It will be shown that certain relationships between past, present, and future concur with certain spatial constitutions. Space-time is therefore a concept that enriches empirical and theoretical work in the social sciences. Macrosociological analyses of modernity, of a transition to flexible accumulation, or processes of exclusion can be elucidated by differentiation between the proposed concentric-linear, networked-episodic, and insular-cyclical space-time types.