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Belonging is a fundamentally temporal experience, yet there exists to date little research on belonging as a temporal phenomenon. This paper offers an important contribution to the literatures on belonging, time and the self by exploring how the experience of belonging is tethered to time. Focussing on the temporal dimensions of the interconnection between belonging and the self contributes to our understanding of how people experience time and construct a sense of self. The data comprise 62 accounts on belonging written by members of the Mass Observation Project’s panel of volunteer writers residing in Great Britain. Two dimensions of duration are explored: first, enduring belonging compared to fleeting belonging and second, belonging that endures ‘out of time’. In relation to the first dimension, I argue that the duration of belonging aids in constructing a coherent self over time and thus speaks to a person’s moral character. The second dimension of duration illustrates experiences of belonging that defy understandings of linear temporality and a singular self, thus demonstrating the fundamentally distributed nature of the self. Attending to the duration of belonging also adds to our empirical understanding of how time is experienced by people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conference paper suggests that temporal diversity is not an object of research. In contrast to biodiversity, 'chronodiversity' is terra incognita. The current threat to temporal diversity can be explained in part by the fact that it is being ignored by scholars. There is, for example, no comprehensive history of the phenomena of the pause, of waiting, repetition or hesitation. There are no systematic, historical or empirical studies of the productivity of these forms of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past negative time perspective (PNTP), characterized by rumination on painful past experiences, is generally considered harmful to a person's well-being. However, there is reason to suspect that a PNTP may not make matters worse if a high PNTP is consistent with culture, as in the case of India. Drawing on the person–culture matching hypothesis, we test the moderating effects of PNTP on the relationship between role stressors and both psychological strain and organizational outcomes among Indian employees in India (n = 253). Two smaller comparison groups of Asian Indians and US-born Americans in the USA were also evaluated to anchor the understanding of the Indians' score on PNTP. This comparison is particularly important given that pressures of globalization on India's culture have created a sustained sense of uncertainty for Indians. Results indicate that the mean score on PNTP is greater for Indians than for US-born Americans (n = 56) and US-Indians (n = 69). Furthermore, having a low PNTP intensified the adverse outcomes due to stressors, whereas a high PNTP had no further impact. Findings suggest that although having an overall PNTP is not ideal, not reflecting on past negative events to cope with current stressors could also be problematic within the Indian context where PNTP is normative. Thus, in a PNTP country, a person's high PNTP has no more adverse effect as stressors increase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how unexpected life course events can potentially be experienced as problematic by challenging anticipated future trajectories. Using data from a qualitative longitudinal study of men interviewed about fatherhood, we consider four unanticipated events in the context of family formation which are variously experienced as propelling men forwards, imposing a pause, or regressing to a previous life course phase. In these situations time represents a threat to personal identity, challenging imagined futures and leading to altered behaviour in the present. These unexpected events appear to have a long-term impact on temporal awareness. By highlighting understandings of the future as a fundamental aspect of experience, we illustrate the importance of making time explicit as a tool for elucidating life course transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper deals with long-term budget travelling from different time perspectives. Narratives of travel, given by women backpackers and interpreted through `time Lenses', lead to an analysis of the journey as an individualized time-space in which the traveller regains control of her own time and movement It is argued that this control, sensed as `freedom', opens up both mind and body to a complexity of different time experiences. These vary depending on context and speed of movement. Thus, the long-term journey into different and diversified cultures is discussed as a move away from clock-time and other structuring devices into a space and time where the traveller is, to a certain extent, left alone to do her own structuring. The backpacker is both living and creating her own time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aims of this research note are to identify the traditional values behind the notion of time in Sicily; to assess Sicilians' attitudes to the past, the present and the future; to record the pace of life of Sicilians and to compare it with that of other cultures. In order to achieve these goals, various research methods were used: analyses of proverbs, interviews, tests and observations. This paper presents the results obtained from the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section introduces several articles and papers on time, culture and representation published in the Volume 4, Number 3, 1995 issue of Time & Society.

The current article conceptualizes free time as subjectively experienced and defined, as it explores not only how individuals spend free time, but also how they perceive and interpret it. It challenges established approaches to leisure that relate to it as a realm of freedom distinct from work or duties, suggesting that the discourse of work imbues free time with ideals, which shape, not only how we spend our free time, but also, how we perceive it and utilize it for self-management. My focus is on the relationship between time, freedom, and the self, while taking into account the input of culture. The theoretical concept that I offer here in order to analyze free time is disciplined freedom. I use this term to refer to the ways by which cultural paradigms shape conceptions and actions of free time by promoting a disciplinary gaze that encourages a form of management of time and the self that adheres to authenticity, freedom, and choice. Based on qualitative data from 43 in-depth interviews, the findings revealed the impact of conflicting discourses that competed in shaping meaning and action related to free time. The article brings into question the freedom of individuals in the face of discursive frameworks that were found to operate as powerful, taken for granted dictates in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the temporal structure of projected futures. The sociology of time is an established line of inquiry, but the existing literature lacks empirically grounded description of the cultural and cognitive dimensions of projected futures. When individuals imagine their futures, what is the qualitative nature and temporal structure of their projected futures? In order to address these questions, we used a mixed-methods strategy of interviews and surveys with 126 persons from a small college in North Carolina. We asked the participants to tell us about their futures. The resulting descriptions form a strongly chronological pattern. When asked about the immediate future (i.e., tomorrow or next week), they tersely describe the tasks that must be completed. In their descriptions of the near future (i.e., next month or next year), they begin to anticipate enjoyable experiences. When they describe the intermediate future (i.e., five to ten years from now), their responses are characterized by detailed and optimistic enthusiasm for the possibilities they envision. They pay little or no attention to the distant future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disorder seems inevitable when a social system changes. The Soviet Union's collapse provided a recent example, and China is now providing a new example. During China's transformation from a communist society with a centrally planned economy to a market-based socialist society, "ethical decline" has become an increasingly serious issue, and one that has high social and economic costs. Historical experience from many cultures shows that this ethical decline is not inherent to Chinese culture. Chinese ethics are being compromised by partnerships between government officials and businessmen who benefit at the expense of society because of a lack of monitoring of such relationships during China's radical institutional change. This growing problem poses serious risks to China's social stability and economic development. To solve the problem, it will be necessary to establish a sound legal framework and more effective monitoring and enforcement, rather than hoping for spontaneous evolution of stronger individual ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three critiques against cultural timelessness, the notion of late style, recycled ready-mades, and minimalist preservation, are examined to show how they are all compromised by a latent idealism. Such idealism, based on the decoupling of time from materiality through removal, displacement or wilful ignorance of material markers of age, forecloses the kinds of radical change and innovation espoused by the above critiques. While they all embrace timeliness and decay in the materiality of artists’ bodies and cultural artefacts, the ideology of timeless bourgeois art persists in their maintenance of a separate immaterial, eternal cultural essence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why different 'times' (or different 'categories of objectified time') coexist among the Amis in Iwan? I argue that the Amis' images of others provide an answer to it. For the Amis in that village, four significant others have relations with them. This article explores how the images of others reflect in the time dimension. In sum, attempting to combine their own cultural traditions with certain cultural elements of 'superior' others, and strive for a better future is the important cultural mechanism of the Amis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-synchronous events are constitutive for the social. Every society has to institutionalize synchronicity over time to make a social order of the present possible. A social world of discontinuity (i.e. a non-synchronized world) is amended by a semantics of simultaneity (i.e. a synchronized world) which makes the non-synchronous appear as synchronous. From this follows that synchronicity is a necessary illusion. Cultures of synchronicity are powerful symbolic representations. The case of the New Europe is a particularly striking case. It synchronizes by standardization and by the timing of standardization which generates non-synchronicity at increasing speed. This is called the first face of Europeanization. The New Europe has to legitimate its non-synchronicity and make it appear as synchronicity. This is called the second face of Europeanization. Thus a culture emerges in which non-synchronicity and synchronicity are constructed simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To illuminate the persisting division between East and West Germany, this article explores temporal aspects of East German culture and their impact on German unification. Arguing that approaches to GDR time in the contemporary literature border on oversimplification, the article focuses on different layers of time in East Germany. It also deals with possible time-related sources of conflict between East and West Germans, such as contradictory temporal work practices. On the basis of ethnographic and documentary evidence, the article argues that ordinary members of the German public may be more subtly aware of clashes in time cultures than this literature suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The management literature frequently characterizes Japanese industrial organization in terms such as collectivism, group-orientation, harmony and team spirit, and attributes these traits to Japan's cultural and traditional uniqueness. However, the author argues that a careful review of Japan's development reveals that its industrialists owe much to western — and primarily American — industrial techniques. The Just-In-Time system's stress on group work does not emerge from the national character or the Tokugawa heritage; it is industrial necessity, a means of achieving maximum efficiency. This idea is by no means alien to western economic theory. Just-In-Time pursues efficiency in the division of labor independent of cultural circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]