Despite a growing interest in temporality as an aspect of social life, it is still unusual to find explicit discussions of the passage of time and the generation of hindsight as aspects of sociological production (Kemper and Peterson Royce, 2002; Mauthner and Doucet, 2003; McLeod and Thomson, 2009). And while there has been a move towards making the silent academic author a more explicit presence within texts (Coffey, 2002: 324), the academic self is by definition compelled to display a command over the ‘data’ and the temporality of the production process (Skeggs, 2002: 351). In practice things are messier, recursive and incremental (Law, 2004). We evolve, change our minds, read and discover as we go. Yet the composition of an academic text demands that we reconstruct this process, situating our labours within a narrative that obscures the temporal dynamics of production and, with it, the mobility and uncertainty that characterise our deliberations. Exceptions to this include the deconstructive turn in ethnographic writing (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Davies, 2008).

A longitudinal data set disrupts the smooth narrativity in which ‘the past is always remade in the light of the present’ (Lawler, 2002: 251). Finding ways of managing such data draws attention to the hidden codes of a sociological discourse within which research subjects are isolated from the temporal flow. It is by eliminating the future from the picture that it becomes possible to focus on the relationship between the data and the social. This continues to be the case even when we have a sequence of data, as with the preceding chapters. The moment at which the analysis is undertaken is a moment of analytic closure. Explanation is achieved retrospectively – the past is condensed, enabling us to see how the individual has come to be where they are, with the quality of explanation being measured by a sense of inevitability. Although destinies may make sense in hindsight, it is impossible to know how futures will evolve and it is important to map the possible destinies which fall away, as the ghosts of ‘unachieved possibilities are an effective part of reality’ (Bertaux and Bertaux-Wiame, 1993: 82).