Chapter One included a discussion of the changing temporal assumptions that underlie political thought. Although the literatures are largely distinct, the idea that our understanding of time is historically and socially variable is also supported by a growing body of work elsewhere in the social sciences. After providing a brief overview of the ideas of anthropologists and sociologists, this chapter considers the development of distinctive ‘time cultures’ associated with the shifts from traditional to modern and postmodern times. It relates these changes to issues of power and control, and the final section of this chapter identifies sources of resistance to the commodified clock time of the capitalist economy.

Durkheim and beyond: the social functions of time

The starting-point for much sociological and anthropological thinking on time is Emile Durkheim's claim that human awareness of time is neither innate nor a straightforward reflection of the rhythms of nature. Rather, it is socially created, a variable ‘social institution’ that comes to be “… objectively thought of by everybody in a single civilisation” and that links the individual to the collective in a way that meets the particular needs of a given society (1971 [1912], p 10; for overviews of work building on this perspective, see Starkey, 1988; Hassard, 1990; Gell, 1992; for more critical discussion, see Gell, 2000).

Many later sociologists have supported and developed Durkheim's idea, arguing, for example, that time is “… a socio-cultural construction which aids people in their efforts to collectively orient themselves in the world and to co-ordinate their activity” (Goudsblom, 2001, p 20), and that “time-reckoning is basically dependent upon the organisation and functions of the group” (Sorokin and Merton, 1990 [1937], p 60). From this perspective, different societies (or different groups within a society), with different patterns of social interaction, will have different perceptions of time, meeting different collective needs. Some writers have extended this functionalist analysis to claim that even ‘deviant’ time cultures may serve the interests of society as a whole. For example, in the 1960s Lewis Coser and Rose Coser argued that although the unwillingness of ‘lower-class’ and Spanish Americans to work hard and plan ahead seems contrary to the future-oriented time culture of the US, it could usefully help maintain the class distinctions necessary for a stable society and reduce competition for upper status positions (!) (1990 [1963]).