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Drawing on semi-structured in-depth biographical interviews with 60 early career Chinese academic returnees, this paper examines the temporal challenges involved in the personal and professional lives of mobile scholars. The key premise is that academic migration process may create temporal resources and opportunities for scholars to pursue career progressions and upward social status, but can also generate temporal constraints in their everyday life, bringing disruptions and discontinuities into their life course timelines. This paper highlights the temporal consequences of academic migration in relation to two perspectives: everyday times and individual lifetimes. Particularly, it also investigates how some returnees exercise agency and employ temporal strategies to alleviate the temporal dissonance produced in and through their moving process. This paper aims to demonstrate whether and how individual scholars confront temporal struggles on a daily basis and reconfigure life course trajectories while negotiating uneven academic mobility regimes. In doing so, the paper develops a temporally sensitive theoretical approach and unpack the multiple kinds of temporalities of academic labour in a cross-border setting, thus further advancing two streams of literature—academic migration and time in migration. Furthermore, it has drawn attention to the growing trend of temporariness and precariousness occurring in modern academia, especially in the context of migration. By examining the temporal tensions academic migrants encounter, this paper answers the call to reconsider the overly romantic engagements with academic mobilities and contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the mobility experiences of the highly skilled.

The relation between time and architecture is well established and thoroughly explored in architectural discourse. Despite this, examination of social time has been lacking. This paper draws on a survey of 114 architects, academics and students who responded to general questions about practice and occupational wellbeing. A finding of this study was the diverse attachments that different groups in the architectural community have to the temporal norms and infrastructures of work and of studio. Based on this study, the paper demonstrates the heterogeneity that exists in architecture and how its temporal norms are negotiated. It concludes that exposing the heterogeneity of temporal experience across a discipline reminds us that the norms of time are negotiated. Moreover, the temporal experience of the everyday transcends the notion that architects passively ascribe to long-hours work culture.

This paper, which is an autoethnographic text in its own right, examines class, gender and education through highlighting the processes at work and the resources drawn upon in the making of autoethnographic texts. At its centre is a poem about my father, which acts as an illustration of how such artefacts exert agency across time, through the play of what Keighley and Pickering refer to as ‘the mnemonic imagination’, enabling a re-interpretation of the past in the present and on into the future. Using the work of feminist scholars Steedman and Walkerdine, the paper offers an insight into the way cultural analyses and ‘affective histories’ make sense of the fortunes of a ‘Scholarship Girl’. At the same time, in exhuming an instance of the good that men do in the form of a crucial intervention in my life by my father, it pays homage to what the poet Robert Hayden called the performance of ‘love’s austere and lonely offices’ plus.

Studies on ecological modernization have produced a fruitful discussion concerning the connection between society and nature based on the evolution of socio-political institutions. However, the question from the individual’s perspective and their evaluation of the environmental institutions’ modernization remains unsystematically explored. This paper introduces the actor’s narratives on what I called time and space restructuration to define a sensitive method to explore the socio-ecological controversies produced by the enactment of a new environmental institution at the national level. The paper reconstructs the social discourse in relation to the exponential growth of Chilean extractive industries, which run in parallel with the government’s intent to ensure high levels of sustainability through institutional changes that occurred between 1990 and 2015. The main argument proposes that rendering the ecological modernization as a final stage of institutional improvement obscures a controversial reorganization of actions and roles at the environmental level. From this perspective, the clash between different organizations of time and space at the environmental level, among different social actors, offers a valid perspective on the re-emergence of socio-ecological conflicts.

Sociological work has often characterized the contemporary future horizon as a space crowded with risks and contingencies. This view has prompted a number of claims that young adults conceptualize the future predominantly in terms of the choices and plans that they make to mitigate against such concerns. As an extension of this logic, a number of studies have suggested that young adults conceptualize the long-term future extending beyond their own lives separately from their more immediate horizon of planning (Leahy et al., 2010; Toffler, 1974 ). This paper discusses how young adults relate to the long-term and more immediate future concurrently, and in doing so considers the points at which the strategies that they use to cope with contingency in their own lives may intersect with the ways that they approach their fears, hopes and imaginings of the long-term future. The data for this paper are drawn from an interview project in which young adults (aged 18–34) were asked to discuss their own futures, and a general idea of the future. The findings are used to form the beginnings of a typology of the approaches that young adults may adopt when engaging with the future, which is then drawn upon to propose that the ways in which they engage with the long-term future are often related to the strategies that they employ when facing their own futures.

What does it mean not to wait? It is possible to live in ways which do not entail waiting? Through close examination of time and its articulations among a group of US 1960s-generation ‘hippies’ and younger ‘drop outs’ in a rural backwater of Hawai‘i, I argue in this paper that it is possible to live without waiting. Drawing on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) and Baba Ram Dass’ countercultural invocation to ‘remember, be here now’, I explore unexpected interruptions to anticipated temporal flows. Structured around three vignettes on failing to hitchhike, learning to do ethnographic fieldwork through stopping trying to do ethnographic fieldwork and an unexpected interruption in the supermarket, this paper builds up a picture of non-waiting in action. Located against a backdrop of waiting as temporal interruption and affective mode, I argue that this group sought to collectively disrupt the affective modes of indifference and/or frustration they grew up with in urban mainland America. Through new forms of affective engagement they became able to collectively reframe temporal interruption as existing within rather than without local temporal flows, interruptions ceased to be ruptures to temporal textures but part of their very fabric. Located within temporal flows, they did not force individuals out of a moral community of (time is money) efficient, productive citizens but reframed productivity itself in terms of producing sociality, positive affective experience and communitas. Out of a multitude of moments of not waiting, a temporal texture of American counterculture emerges.

The paper studies two temporal metaphors, modern and poetic, encountered in a knowledge-based organization where they co-exist and conflict. It argues that the two metaphors are wedded to different discourses, i.e. to the macro-business and the micro-scientific discourse, respectively; hence, knowledge activities such as thinking and writing are increasingly rendered incomprehensible in commercialized research environments, and pushed at the margin of knowledge-work, since they prove difficult to measure and control. Practically, this implies a re-articulation of what innovation is and how to organize knowledge work. The paper explores the shortcomings linear metaphors of time bear when used to support radical innovation, and concludes by discussing the potentials of spiral time to structure work in knowledge organizations.

The present article argues that despite growing rates of single living worldwide, alternative representations of the single women who do not necessarily spend their life ‘waiting for the one’ are regularly absent from public view. By exploring the injunction as well as the option of non-waiting, this paper contributes to time studies by stressing how understandings of waiting inform hegemonic and alternative forms of temporal subjectivity and sociality. In the first part of this paper, I explore the ways in which the injunction to stop waiting is articulated in heteronormative imagery. This call is regularly expressed with temporal urgency, and from this vantage point waiting comes to represent passivity and immobility. Accordingly, women are expected to ‘move on’ and be active in their own self-governance, which adapts to conventional norms of femininity. In the second part of this article, I demonstrate how the option of non-waiting dismantles and reworks heteronormative life scripts, and offers new subject positions for single women. These reflections propose alternative timetables that allow single women to reclaim their temporal agency and re-define their own temporal rhythms and life trajectories.

The telegraph literally and figuratively electrified news by transforming reporting into a process that delivered impulses of information whose timeliness often riveted and sometimes excited newspaper audiences. The now-familiar daily news cycle—scheduled reports of recent news punctuated by even more timely breaking news—originated with telegraphic journalism. Daily papers began presenting themselves as the public’s portal to an electrified national and international newsgathering network. Looking beyond the role of telegraph firms and wire services, this study explores how the culture of journalistic timeliness was cultivated in organizational, occupational, and public settings. Organizationally, telegraph-enabled timeliness altered every stage of the news-production process, from reporter-source interactions to the delivery of stories to readers. The press reified timeliness internally through organizational rewards and occupational discourses, and externally by projecting its institutional values through marketing and the metatexts that accompanied stories. For the audience, daily papers conveyed the temporal rhythms of a networked industrial society. Audiences valued some timely news as data inputs that enhanced opportunities to participate in distant affairs or influence outcomes, though for economic intelligence private channels almost always outstripped newspapers’ public delivery of the same information. But even electrified news valued mostly for its storytelling made events common to many people simultaneously in a manner that encouraged the construction of meaning by scattered audiences. In those situations, timeliness often meant that news circulated fast enough for reactions around the nation to become part of the story itself.

This paper enquires into the history of clock-time through a critical engagement with Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift’s Shaping the Day. The paper delineates the contours of an approach to the history of clock-time based on an analysis of the parallelism between the historical trajectories of clock-time and market relations. This approach is presented through a four-fold critical engagement with Glennie and Thrift's book assessing theoretical shortcomings, definitional problems, normative commitments and historical method.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the “ecology of social time” as an empirical concept of time to bridge the gap between theory and empirical research in the sociology of time. First, this paper proposes that social time could be considered as an institutionalized referential mechanism that enables social interactions to occur at a specific time point by coordinating the social actions of various agents. Examining the condition of temporal coordination and diagnosing its fairness critically may be the tasks involved in the sociology of time. Second, this paper suggests that the ecology of social time is a useful concept for integrating the theses and tasks applied in the sociology of time. Finally, this paper presents an ecological model of social time as a possible framework for subsequent empirical research in the sociology of time.

Increasing time pressures, an accelerating pace of work and the need to juggle an increasing number of competing demands are common experiences of academics working in contemporary universities. At the same time, notions of ‘time famine’ and ‘time squeeze’ have formed relatively long-standing topics of social science research and popular debate. This article draws together interviews with 15 academics based in sociology departments at four UK universities, with existing research on time, work and leisure to explore the social dynamics that underpinned these academics’ experiences. The paper argues that it is not only quantities of overall work, but the qualities of time made through everyday work, which are important for academics’ experiences of time. In particular, the paper identifies three key mechanisms that pull towards the fragmentation of daily and weekly schedules: work–leisure boundary making, organisational structuring of time and the intrinsic rhythms of practices. These mechanisms combined in different configurations depending on institution type and career stage, advantaging some and disadvantaging others. The paper provides an alternative to existing accounts about the effects of new managerialism and audit culture on academic practice, which focus on how increasing amounts of work ‘squeeze time’, and suggests that we should equally be concerned with how qualities of time are made in practice, and the effects of contemporary contexts on these processes.

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 multiple simultaneous “heres,” “theres,” and “in-betweens.” A subset of migrants, temporary labor migrants, provides an interesting opportunity to consider how migration affects time (including the perception of time). States permit temporary labor migrants to immigrate only because they consent to emigrate after a predetermined, contracted period. In this paper, we consider what it means to enter into such “migration time” arrangements that warp, transform, and curtail time for migrants, their children, employers, community members, left-behind families, and the state. Migrants’ children who typically exist outside state-brokered labor migration deals develop alternate timescapes from their migrant parents. Based on the analysis of interview data and complementary follow-up conversations with 43 temporary labor migrants in Israel from 11 different countries, we examine how the migration process creates nonlinear time and how migrants discover, lament, manage, enjoy, and struggle with multiple timescapes. Building on the work of Saulo Cwerner, we replicate his model on time and migration to show general patterns for immigrants and modes particular to temporary labor migrants including time ruptures, freedom time (short-term opportunities), and ambiguous time (fuzzy continuities).

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 doubled, as both emerging from and constitutive of the social worlds that they seek to understand. We detail our own very different methodological experiments with studying the social life of time in London, engaging interactive documentary to elucidate nonlinear imaginaries of space-time in London’s pop-up culture (Ella Harris) and encountering time on a series of walks along a particular stretch of road in south east London (Beckie Coleman). While clearly different projects in terms of their content, ambition and scope, in bringing these projects together, we show the ability of our methods to grasp and perform from multiple angles and scales what Sharma (2014) calls ‘temporal architectures’. Temporal architectures, composed of elements including the built environment, commodities, services, technologies and labour, are infrastructures that enable social rhythms and temporal logics and that can entail a politicized valuing of the time of certain groups over others. We aim to contribute to an expanded and enriched conceptualisation of methods for exploring time, considering what our studies might offer to work on the doubled social life of time and methods, and highlighting in particular their implications for an engagement with a politics of time and temporality.

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 time of white modernity then provides the primary focus. Finally, I conclude with a call for the resetting of the Euro-chronometer, whose oppressive temporality has historically come in both left and right versions.

In contemporary societies, chronological age is widely used as a temporal basis for regulating and organising social processes. A strong system of chrononormativity provides orientation on, for example, the appropriate time range to start working, have children, or to retire. This contribution explores the multiple temporal organisations of the life course by focussing on the transition from work to retirement as the beginning of ‘old age’. It asks how people get to become ‘old’ through temporal normalities at two scales: first, the life course scale at which temporal normalities are institutionalised; and second, the everyday life scale at which temporal normalities are routinised; and how these two scales are mutually related. The paper is structured as follows: first, I outline the implications of a practice theory perspective on time and the temporal organisation of social practices across the life course; second, I discuss two concepts in order to grasp this temporal organisation, namely chrononormativity and norma-/temporality ; third, I present empirical material on assessments of the ‘right’ timing to retire, the re-structuration of everyday time in the retirement transition, and the re-negotiation of ‘wasting time’ in retirement. Results suggest the assessment of certain practices as time ‘well spent’ or ‘wasted’. And it is exactly in this assessment that links chrononormativity to norma-/temporality in retirement: Based on an increased awareness of one’s location at the latter part of the life course, the question regarding how the (limited and decreasing) time left is spent gains a completely new significance and can, hence, become a strong marker of distinction. However, the ambivalence in participants’ account suggests a potential for ‘queering’ time and age as a set of practices that resist and destabilise temporal rhythms.

This paper is aimed at understanding how we engage with the future in different ways in everyday life. Many empirical studies have emphasised that what we usually call ‘imagination’ of the future takes diverse forms and meanings. Varied narratives of the future that are possible coexist in daily life in a bumpy, semi-conscious and occasionally tense dialogue with one another. To understand this variation of narratives, a thorough exploration of the different modes of engaging with the future that various forms of agency bring into play is required, together with a sensitive empirical analysis. I use Thévenot’s theory of regimes of engagement as a starting point to at least partially explain this variety. Thévenot’s idea that different types of individual involvement in relation to different definitions of the relevant reality (e.g. familiarity, plans and the public domain of justification and exploration) contain interesting implications for the analysis of what I define as modes of engagement with the future. As involved as we are with social reality through specific formats, so are we with the future. As the ‘relevant reality’ is different according to the regime of engagement that we are involved in, the nature of anticipation also varies. The future is ‘made and measured’ within the logic of probability in the regime of plans; of possibility in the regime of justification; of practical anticipation in the regime of familiarity; and of discovery in the regime of exploration. This perspective helps to avoid a reification of the future as something that is ‘there’ and that we simply discover and avoids easy dichotomisation of forms of anticipation of the future as realistic or unrealistic.

Inspired by G.H. Mead’s philosophy of time and his focus on the present as the site of interpretation of past experiences and thoughts about the future, this paper makes cross-national comparisons between four cases of young Norwegian and British men. The method is case-based biographical analysis. Levels of biographical time, family time and historical time intersect in young men’s orientation to the future in a present set in the current contexts of Norway and Britain. The overarching question addresses if and how timing at the biographical level, related to family time and resources, harmonise with features of opportunity structures in the national contexts. Two typologies are identified: those whose future orientations correspond with standards for ‘successful’ trajectories are named confident continuity while cautious contingency characterises the orientation of those whose biographical timing of transitions is not in synchrony with family time nor with standards in the current opportunity structure.

This paper utilizes American pragmatism and phenomenology to illustrate that scholars must engage with both memories of the past and hopes for the future if we want to know how either influences activists’ actions in the present. A synthesis of these theoretical approaches highlights how, in the real experience of time, the past, present, and future are in constant flux and affect one another, shaping both our valuations of a moment and the actions we take. The Populist movement in the late 19th century USA illustrates how scholars should try to incorporate analyses of memories, contemporary context, and desired futures to fully understand the experiences and decisions of protesters. Engaging with time, both with the real experience of those we study and also how it affects our analyses, improves our understandings of social phenomena. By focusing on how actors attempt to synchronize disparate temporalities, we gain a clearer understanding both of the heterogeneity that composes a movement and what makes them unified into a singular social phenomenon.

In this paper, which is empirically grounded in ethnographic research conducted among persons living in Norway without legal permission, we explore the temporal dimensions of irregular migration. I...

This paper aims to clarify the proper position of time as sociology’s basic concept in relation to meaning ( Sinn). In sociology, the inseparable relationship between time and meaning has been clearly shown by Schutz’s phenomenological sociology and Luhmann’s social systems theory. Referring to the respective theories of Bergson and Husserl, Schutz argued that the problem of meaning in Weber’s interpretative sociology is a problem of time. The meaning of an action that an actor subjectively thinks of is determined not by a common normative value for example, but rather through her/his own inner time: the meaning of an ongoing action ( Handeln) is the act ( Handlung) projected as an aim in the stream of consciousness. Similarly, Luhmann considered self-referential social systems as temporal subjects that cognize their own reality of the external world. Phenomena appearing to a social system through communicative intentionality are weighted by the system’s own past and future, and are thereby selectively (not randomly) actualized as meaningful units in the present. System order (or social order) is thus temporally organized in the atemporal, chaotic world of meaning. “Self-reference” is to refer to a system’s own eigen time ( Eigenzeit), which provides the basis for a system’s autonomy or freedom.

The paper argues that a mathematical approach might contribute to the consolidation of time as an epistemic object, while strengthening the sociology of time as a more influential domain in social sciences. This might be accomplished due to the performative role of mathematical formalisations. Also, it means appropriating the textual reality resulted in formalising processes as a space which researchers act through and upon. Thus, mathematical formalisations should be understood not only as modelling and data processing devices but also as relevant actors in networks of knowledge production. In this context, we reassess the practice of formalisation by proposing a vocabulary through which mathematical language might be used to meaningfully approach the socio-temporal order, with positive consequences in the reinforcement of a scientific community of practice.

This paper explores the role of time in Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory with a view to highlighting, and plugging, some of its conceptual gaps. It proceeds by identifying four elements of the social structuring of temporal experience: the temporal structure of consciousness; field rhythms and pace; imposed timings; and time binds. The first two of these Bourdieu brought to the fore, even if there are some aspects of his account in need of further development. The third he posited without tracing through the full conceptual consequences, while the fourth requires some reorientation and additional work to accommodate it. The latter I undertake by elaborating on a few concepts drawn from both Bourdieu’s corpus and phenomenology.

Unlike the memes of popular digital culture, philosophical understanding accumulates through the patience of reflection on the long-term implications of human action. The paper will draw upon the recent work of Paul Virilio to explain the threat that the speeds of digital culture pose to philosophy, both as an institutionalised discipline of human inquiry with a just claim to public support, and as an intellectual practice with a just claim to public relevance. If Virilio is correct, the trajectory of technological development is towards the displacement of human decision making from all spheres of social life (political, economic, military, cultural, and technical-scientific) because human thought is too slow. Hence, there are moves towards eliminating the deliberative function of human thought in favour of pre-programmed algorithms that can trade a stock or fire a missile in immediate response to a pre-determined set of objective circumstances. Philosophy cannot keep pace. Since it is committed to an open-ended dialectic of interpretation, reason giving, critique, and rejoinder, its time frames are incompatible with immediate response, and would, if allowed to operate in politics or economics, impede the ‘efficient’ execution of routines. However, the ‘efficient’ execution of the dominant political and economic routines is undermining the conditions of life on the planet. Hence, the defence of slow philosophical thinking is at the same time the affirmation of a different temporality of life, politics, economics, and cultural interaction. Philosophy is not a luxury that humanity can no longer afford, but the vital necessity of historically informed intelligence the solution of our most pressing environmental and social problems requires more than ever.

Traditional urban planning methodologies cannot solve today’s planning challenges that cities pose. Citizens’ needs have substantially changed the last decade while urban planning methods have remained the same since the 70s. A more citizen-centric urban planning is presented in this paper. To that end, and to effectively deal with citizens’ larger data needed for the urban planning methodological reinvention, interdisciplinary work is supported with information and communication technologies. We conducted a survey of citizens on urban time-use (Marsal MLl and Lopez MB (2014) Smart urban planning: Designing urban-land-use from urban time-use. Journal of Urban Technology 21(1): 39–54). The results on urban-time-use distribution were converted into urban-land-uses as pioneering methodology for the reinvention of urban planning methodologies. In order to get the highest voluntary participation from citizens to ensure a good representation of all ages and social groups, the survey has to be designed with adap...

This paper addresses the relation between the social and the temporal. Its goal is to investigate the ways in which collective embeddedness interferes with the experience of time. To address this relation, I engage the concept of actuality in the work of Walter Benjamin. On the one hand, Benjamin's work offers a wealth of inspiring, intriguing, and elaborated reflections on the relation between actuality and temporality; on the other hand, as I will argue, it is flawed by decisive and illustrative mistakes and ambivalences. Consequently, the article has a double aim: By pointing toward fundamental theoretical problems and ambivalences at the basis of Benjamin's work, it hopes to say something new about the relation between the social and the temporal.

In recent decades, time-use diaries have emerged as useful tools for recording information on the amount of time that people devote to various activities. Debate remains, however, about whether there are significant differences between the results given by diaries and the results given by questionnaires regarding the share of unpaid labour in the household, in particular the differences between men and women. This paper is a contribution to that debate and widens the focus to consider another type of survey that contains questions that do not call for the measurement of time devoted to housework and caregiving, but rather explore people’s perceptions of the percentage of total housework that they perform.