Time & SocietyPub Date : 2020-08-25DOI: 10.1177/0961463X20950983
L. S. Hansen
{"title":"“It’s not even the leaders out here who have any say at all in how long they’re gonna have to wait”: A study of waiting time, power, and acceptance","authors":"L. S. Hansen","doi":"10.1177/0961463X20950983","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X20950983","url":null,"abstract":"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 that citizens accept that they have to wait because they believe that frontline workers have no power to reduce waiting time. I explore this through an ethnographic study of citizens on social assistance at an activation site in Denmark where they perform labor to receive their benefits. The study makes three contributions to the existing scholarship on waiting time. First, it combines observations of both frontline workers’ decisions about waiting time and how citizens experience these decisions. I explore how the frontline workers make citizens wait to perform labor and leave at the end of the day. The length of waiting changes daily, and citizens are rarely informed about how long they have to wait. I observe that citizens accept the waiting time even though they associate it with frustration, demotivation, and uncertainty. Second, what engenders this acceptance is the frontline workers’ tendency to deflect “blame away” from their power to impose waiting time. When they justify their decisions, they deflect blame either “upwards” (toward the rules or their management) or “downwards” (toward troublesome citizens). Third, the study shows that waiting time do not only reflect structural asymmetries between the citizens and the frontline workers. Citizens accept that they have to wait, because they build trust with the frontline workers and believe that the reduction of waiting time is beyond their control. This shows that the power of waiting time is also relationally produced.","PeriodicalId":47347,"journal":{"name":"Time & Society","volume":"29 1","pages":"1128 - 1149"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0961463X20950983","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42301686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Time & SocietyPub Date : 2020-08-21DOI: 10.1177/0961463X20951333
C. Xu
{"title":"Time, class and privilege in career imagination: Exploring study-to-work transition of Chinese international students in UK universities through a Bourdieusian lens","authors":"C. Xu","doi":"10.1177/0961463X20951333","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X20951333","url":null,"abstract":"Existing research and policy on international students’ study-to-work transition fall short of a temporal theoretical perspective that is sensitive to the fluid and class-stratified nature of their career imagination. Career imagination refers to how international students conceive of, enact and reconfigure their careers as they encounter novel circumstances along their life courses. Drawing on in-depth interview data with 21 Chinese international students and graduates at UK higher education institutions, this article adopts a primarily Bourdieusian framework that centres around how time, class and privilege intersect to shape these students’ career imagination. In this framework, time is conceptualised both as a form of coveted cultural capital and as an underlining mechanism that constitutes these students’ habitus. This theoretical orientation facilitates exposition of the complex rationale behind the two observed temporal career strategies, ‘deferred gratification’ and ‘temporal destructuring’ and accentuates nuanced inequalities pertaining to fine-grained familial class backgrounds and places of origin of these students. This article furnishes empirical cases that challenge extant policy and empirical literature’s tendency to consider international students and their career imagination as homogeneous, individualised and present-focused. Instead, the empirical findings reveal how these Chinese international students’ career imagination is class-differentiated, embedded within and influenced by broader temporal structures and constantly evolving. This article thus advances understanding about how temporally sensitive and better differentiated career supports should be and could be tailored for international students at policy and practice levels.","PeriodicalId":47347,"journal":{"name":"Time & Society","volume":"30 1","pages":"5 - 29"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0961463X20951333","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42386544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Time & SocietyPub Date : 2020-08-19DOI: 10.1177/0961463X20951679
L. Benda
{"title":"Inevitability, contingency, and the epistemic significance of time","authors":"L. Benda","doi":"10.1177/0961463X20951679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X20951679","url":null,"abstract":"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 this study, I critically examine these epistemological considerations in the available body of work on scientific temporality and argue that while there has been significant progress in our understanding of the manifold temporal layers of scientific practice, the analysis of their epistemic impact has remained rather limited in certain aspects. In particular, whereas the recent studies of academic time successfully overcome the binary perspective of “fast versus slow” academia, their considerations of the epistemic role of scientific temporality in particular seem nevertheless still couched in similarly binary terms. Against this background, the study explores—in a deliberately speculative fashion—how the available investigations into the temporal structure of science can be progressively utilized and further developed so as to enable an even more complex, nonbinary understanding of the manifold ways in which scientific practice is affected by its temporal conditions. Drawing on the contingentism/inevitabilism debate in the contemporary philosophy of science, as well as on Andrew Pickering’s “mangle” theory of practice, I develop a tentative argument that the temporal structure of scientific work should be perceived as affecting not merely the speed of scientific development—whether negatively or positively—but more importantly also its direction.","PeriodicalId":47347,"journal":{"name":"Time & Society","volume":"30 1","pages":"30 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0961463X20951679","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45223726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Time & SocietyPub Date : 2020-08-13DOI: 10.1177/0961463X20947531
Ángel Alonso-Domínguez, J. Callejo, C. Díaz-Méndez
{"title":"How the type of working day affects work–life balance and mealtime balance: A study based on the time use survey","authors":"Ángel Alonso-Domínguez, J. Callejo, C. Díaz-Méndez","doi":"10.1177/0961463X20947531","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X20947531","url":null,"abstract":"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 balance in two areas that are key to understanding the difficulty of reconciling timetables. On the one hand, there is the relationship between the type of working day and housework or family care (balance between paid and unpaid work). On the other hand, there is the relationship between the type of working day and eating (mealtime balance). The data indicate that the type of working day affects the balance between paid and unpaid work less than might be expected, since in all cases, it is women who do more unpaid work, while men’s involvement in housework changes little, whether they have a continuous or a split working day. However, the continuous working day is more favourable to balancing work and family life. In contrast, work–mealtime balance is a cultural feature that equalises both sexes in relation to an established habit that encourages sharing time outside work. We can thus speak of shared (non-work) time and unshared (unpaid) work.","PeriodicalId":47347,"journal":{"name":"Time & Society","volume":"29 1","pages":"1082 - 1103"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0961463X20947531","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43227841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Time & SocietyPub Date : 2020-08-12DOI: 10.1177/0961463X20948987
Suzy Ben Dori, A. Kemp
{"title":"Undoing age, redefining gender, and negotiating time: Embodied experiences of midlife women in endurance sports","authors":"Suzy Ben Dori, A. Kemp","doi":"10.1177/0961463X20948987","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X20948987","url":null,"abstract":"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 and how these experiences correspond with normative socio-temporal assumptions about midlife transitions, gender, and the body. Findings reveal that endurance sports enable midlife women to challenge dominant discourses on the “decaying” and “menopausal” body by undoing age and formulating gender narratives that include new identities and negotiations of temporal orders. The interplay between undoing age and redefining gender operates through two mechanisms: “embodied experiences” that introduce the body as a material reality and a source of critical knowledge, and the liminality of mid-age as a life-course transition characterized by the absence of institutional and symbolic anchors. We make a twofold contribution to the critical literature on gender and life course. First, we develop the concept of embodied experiences as a vantage point for understanding the intersections of age and gender. Second, we highlight the potential of participation in endurance sports for negotiating temporal orders and formulate new narratives of femininity and aging.","PeriodicalId":47347,"journal":{"name":"Time & Society","volume":"29 1","pages":"1104 - 1127"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0961463X20948987","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42172478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Time & SocietyPub Date : 2020-08-05DOI: 10.1177/0961463X20944038
Javier Fernández-Sebastián
{"title":"Waving the historian’s magic wand: Temporal comparisons and analogies in the writing of history","authors":"Javier Fernández-Sebastián","doi":"10.1177/0961463X20944038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X20944038","url":null,"abstract":"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 samples of the sources of inspiration of some recurrent temporal parallelisms in the Western tradition. The third identifies two key moments in the history of modern Europe when temporal analogies assumed particular importance. These two periods – two turns of the century (16th century and 18th century) – correspond to transitional phases between successive stages in the development of Western historical consciousness. The article ends with a brief reflection on the usefulness and limits of temporal analogies in the writing of history.","PeriodicalId":47347,"journal":{"name":"Time & Society","volume":"30 1","pages":"517 - 535"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0961463X20944038","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43478778","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Time & SocietyPub Date : 2020-07-21DOI: 10.1177/0961463X20940471
Carl Öhman
{"title":"A theory of temporal telepresence: Reconsidering the digital time collapse","authors":"Carl Öhman","doi":"10.1177/0961463X20940471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X20940471","url":null,"abstract":"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 ethical dimensions of, the notion of time collapse. Pursuing this goal, I introduce the concept of temporal friction, denoting informational resistance that makes moments of time perceivable as separate for an embodied epistemic agent. I argue that the concept of temporal friction offers a more flexible and precise interpretation of collapsed time, and draw on two examples – search warrants and the so-called digital remains – to illustrate its ethical significance.","PeriodicalId":47347,"journal":{"name":"Time & Society","volume":"29 1","pages":"1061 - 1081"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0961463X20940471","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49608443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Time & SocietyPub Date : 2020-07-17DOI: 10.1177/0961463X20938590
Z. Knezevic
{"title":"Social change in developmental times? On ‘changeability’ and the uneven timings of child welfare interventions","authors":"Z. Knezevic","doi":"10.1177/0961463X20938590","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X20938590","url":null,"abstract":"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 child welfare interventions versus interventions that are recommended after long ongoing assessments. Such recommendations are addressed as unequal in terms of timing. The article discusses temporal themes related to permanency versus temporary, which guide assessments of changeability. I show how immediate interventions respond to chronicity—the temporality of incurability, permanency, and underdevelopment. However, social problems in long ongoing assessments are assessed as permanent only after long ongoing observations or passage of time. The article discusses how ideas about change reproduce wider societal and intersecting inequalities. This becomes visible when considering time as allocated to parents and their potential to bring about change. I argue that even though permanency differs from chronicity, it still limits a discussion about change as societal, and the detection of problems remains within a developmentalist and neoliberal framework. In the concluding remarks, I offer an alternative reading of allocated time that can manoeuvre developmentalist logics, while balancing responsibilisation between the individual and the society.","PeriodicalId":47347,"journal":{"name":"Time & Society","volume":"29 1","pages":"1040 - 1060"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0961463X20938590","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44739850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Time & SocietyPub Date : 2020-07-17DOI: 10.1177/0961463X20938593
Nancy Worth, E. A. Karaagac
{"title":"The temporalities of free knowledge work: Making time for media engagement","authors":"Nancy Worth, E. A. Karaagac","doi":"10.1177/0961463X20938593","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X20938593","url":null,"abstract":"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. We offer three key findings: First, there is an ongoingness to media participation; preparation, training, and responding to comments are less visible forms of work beyond the obvious media contact. Unpacking the ongoingness of media engagement highlights the temporalities hidden within the extended present of media work. Second, contributors need to make time for this impromptu knowledge work, a complex process involving decisions about the value of each engagement. We argue that contributing to the media demands not only the knowledge work of being a source but also the labour to make and manage the time to contribute. Third, paying attention to the spacetimes of media engagement reveals the inequalities of this work. Contributing to the media often requires working beyond typical (paid) work hours and spaces, bringing additional burdens on women who do more caring and household labour. Examining the temporalities of media engagement as a form of invisible ‘free’ labour—and as a form of knowledge work that occurs inside other knowledge work—allows us to consider how work is changing in the new economy.","PeriodicalId":47347,"journal":{"name":"Time & Society","volume":"29 1","pages":"1024 - 1039"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0961463X20938593","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48924999","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Time & SocietyPub Date : 2020-07-07DOI: 10.1177/0961463X20933479
G. Genosko, P. Hegarty
{"title":"Smearing time: Critical temporality and corporate ontology","authors":"G. Genosko, P. Hegarty","doi":"10.1177/0961463X20933479","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X20933479","url":null,"abstract":"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 Time Protocol servers is couched in terms of a period extending initially over 20 h, ultimately reaching 24 h. Google is intent on taking ownership of the smear and transducing it into a technologically stabilised change. Although there are a number of different strategies of smearing time, Google advocates for its standard smear that it wants other digital giants like Bloomberg, Amazon and Microsoft to replicate. In this paper we first analyze Google's temporal strategy in terms of its affinities and departures from the classical view of time in Aristotle's core considerations in the Physics Book IV, in terms of a consonant enumeration but in our example at variable speeds/intervals, and then in terms of Wolfgang Ernst's conception of time-critical media. Leap seconds conform to Ernst's sense of kairotic time, an auspicious micro-moment that is both techno-mathematically pre-defined and decisive for ensuring operationality. Google executes smeared time-critical processes but wants to establish mastery over the measurement and manipulation of humanly imperceptible microtemporal events by inhabiting temporal ontology itself, proposing its practice, based on misleading its servers, as a model for other digital hegemons.","PeriodicalId":47347,"journal":{"name":"Time & Society","volume":"29 1","pages":"1009 - 1023"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0961463X20933479","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42148569","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}