As it is well known, sociological studies on time go back at least as far as Durkheim. However, they experienced their golden age from the early 1980s and the field has long been split between the macro-sociological and structural analyses of the collective use of time and micro-sociological analyses of how time is perceived, represented and used: in substance, the struggle between structure and action. From the 1980s onwards this area of study largely expanded in Italy too and started to support significantly its international enhancement by putting forward innovative paradigms, discussing traditional point of view and leading some to conceive of the «sociology of time» not as a part of general sociology but rather as an autonomous branch. This essay reconstructs, according to an overall perspective, the whole Italian path of these theoretical and empirical social studies since their origin until now: always looking at the links with the international evolution of this object of analysis and focusing on the main ideas, institutions and research teams who have been and remain, in some prominent cases, at the forefront of the field.
Education is widely seen as a key solution to the environmental multi-crisis, yet contemporary systems have done little to prevent ecological breakdown. This article argues that the gap between education's promise and its actual impact is not merely a matter of implementation but of temporality. Dominant models of education operate within ‘shallow time’, structured by short-term economic rationales and individualised notions of progress, as seen in frameworks like ‘twenty-first-century skills’. These temporal imaginaries align education with market logics, reproducing the extractivist systems that underpin ecological collapse. This article deploys the concept of ‘deep time’ as a diagnostic lens through which the contingency and narrowness of shallow-time education come into sharp relief. Yet deep time, when instrumentalised, carries its own dangers, as the philosophy of strong longtermism demonstrates. The article proposes that the attempt to embody deep time within the necessarily finite frame of a human lifespan — to hold what cannot be held — generates complexity, nonlinearity, and multiple layered temporalities, stimulating the ‘temporal imagination’. Rather than a deficit, uncertainty thus becomes central to education's ethical orientation — one that resists the pursuit of predictable outcomes while remaining firmly committed to social and environmental justice. By foregrounding temporality as a site of political and ethical struggle, this paper contributes to broader debates about time, agency, and the purpose of education in the environmental multi-crisis.
As large-scale climate interventions such as solar geoengineering gain traction in formal assessment processes, the role of computer-based models in shaping anticipatory governance remains underexplored. This paper examines how model intercomparison projects serve as infrastructural sites for synchronization, aligning diverse scientific, technical, and political timelines to facilitate expert foresight. Through an analysis of the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project, we demonstrate how the organization of data through experimental protocols and historical simulations is a contested practice where experts negotiate shared schedules and rhythms of anticipation. Our findings reveal that many practices for synchronization are mundane and happen outside formal models. Despite the highly technical nature of computer-based modelling, with its emphasis on the uniform temporality of numerical calculation, we argue that important to the synchronization of deployment scenarios is the exercise of practical judgement, as experts discern and seize opportunities to reorient collective expectations about the future. By foregrounding this kairological dimension to knowledge infrastructures, we highlight the politics of anticipation that experts are engaged in, influencing how societies perceive and respond to the feasibility of large-scale climate interventions.
Since the 1990s, CAMPFIRE has promised the Tembo Mvura development (clinic, school, bridge and permanent housing). These facilities have been built by NGOs and missionaries, and yet the community does not experience them as development. They continue to wait for CAMPFIREA to deliver on its promises. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork across 6 years to examine what this paradox reveals about the relationship between waiting, governance and subjectivity in Kanyemba. It argues that institutional deferral has reshaped how the Tembo Mvura understand what counts as legitimate development and who has the authority to deliver it. The paper extends the temporal governance framework to a post-colonial conservation context, documents a gendered and intergenerational dimension of waithood rooted in the criminalisation of livelihoods and revises the passive/active distinction in the waiting discourse.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread disruptions to daily life which impacted how people used and experienced time. This study employed a mixed-method, person-centered approach to investigate people's subjective experiences of time during the first year of the pandemic. Specifically, it aimed to investigate experiences of time as multifaceted, measuring the pandemic's impact on people's perceptions of routine changes, passage of time, and quantity of time. Further, the study explored participants’ descriptions of their temporal experiences. Data were collected from an online survey of 272 participants ( M age = 27.74, SD = 11.95) in Spring 2021. A latent class analysis identified two distinct classes: Varied Time Changes and Minimal Perceived Changes. Reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) of open-ended survey responses revealed that those in the Varied Time Changes group described feelings of disorientation, lack of temporal structure, and an inability to use time meaningfully, while Minimal Perceived Changes participants focused on themes of accepting change as normal, maintaining routines, and savoring the present moment. Notably, the Minimal Perceived Changes group was significantly older ( M = 37.86, SD = 14.28) than Varied Time Changes ( M = 26.89, SD = 11.36). This study contributes to understanding the complexity of temporal experiences under prolonged uncertainty, highlighting the importance of personal context in shaping one's response to broad social disruptions.
This review examines The Time Inheritors: How Time Inequalities Shape Higher Education Mobility in China by Cora Lingling Xu, a book that offers a conceptually rich and empirically grounded analysis of time as a structuring force in educational inequality. Drawing on nearly a decade of longitudinal and multi-sited fieldwork, Xu develops the concept of ‘time inheritance’ to theorize how temporal privilege or deprivation is transmitted across generations. The review highlights the book's contributions in several areas: the empirical depth and narrative sensitivity of its account of temporal inequality in China across multiple levels; its conceptualization of time inheritance and its extension of Bourdieu's theory of capital; and its reframing of educational mobility as temporal repositioning. Situating the book within broader discussions of time, modernity, and acceleration, the review suggests future directions for theorizing time inheritance in light of institutional pacing, shifting global conditions, and comparative contexts. Xu's work opens up a generative framework for research on the temporal politics of education and inequality in China and beyond.
In changeable times, seasons can feel like dependable coordinates for dividing up the year and setting order to annual cycles, providing reference points to tell the time and organise society's activities. Seasons have come to be institutionalised temporal patterns and symbol systems, as ubiquitous and taken-for-granted as language, and held in place by history, culture, routines and norms as well as science – to the point they become seen as natural categories. This editorial introduces a special issue that seeks to problematise this understanding of seasons as laws of nature, arguing that it overlooks the cultural origins of seasonal categories, glosses over their contestedness and precludes a meaningful discussion of how seasons are varying and changing for societies. Societies today live by different seasons than they have in history. Facing accelerating global changes – in climate or globalisation for instance – some societies feel they no longer recognise familiar framings of seasons, and some seek to create seasonal categories anew. The seven papers in this issue encourage readers to consider seasons as ‘polyrhythmic cultural frameworks’ – as the patterns people perceive in tangles of multiple rhythms – and as undergoing constant renewal and evolution across different levels of society and at different timescales. The articles give accounts of encounters between different seasonal patterns – how they clash or sync or run in parallel – and how seasonality is renegotiated through these encounters. This editorial draws on the contributions to the special issue to first describe seasons as polycentric cultural frameworks, and using that concept, to lay out 10 ways in which seasons are under-going rapid change.
When navigating the confusing scene of doctoral applications to Western higher education institutions, international and racialised doctoral applicants sometimes turn to online question-and-answer fora such as Zhihu in China for advice. How then, do such social media fora portray the desirability of doctoral supervisors from diverse racial backgrounds? Drawing on critical race theory, postcolonial critiques of the ‘modern time’ and conceptions of academic time, this article conducts a thematic analysis of 450 Zhihu comments and unpacks how the internalisation and normalisation of white privilege are embedded in a steep racialised temporal hierarchy. This article argues that the Zhihu comments construct a racialised temporal order in which (1) racialised doctoral supervisors are positioned as already ‘too late’ in time and modernity, their intensive supervisory practices recoded as the residue of tradition, and their time depicted as devalued, stolen, and illegitimised, while (2) white supervisors are construed as moderators of time itself, portrayed as gaining time and recognition and becoming symbols of ‘cool’ and ‘safe’ supervision. This article further proposes three provocations to tackle such constructions of racialised temporal inequalities in doctoral supervision. These include (1) accentuating the unquantifiable nature of ‘racial time’ as an intervention in and of itself and refusing to legitimise ‘white time’; (2) recognising the complicated roles of social media fora like Zhihu in perpetuating racial hierarchies while also acknowledging their potential in facilitating debates to challenging global white supremacy; and (3) channelling such time-focused findings to foster ‘critical collaborative communities’. Empirically, this article makes contributions by unpacking how these Zhihu comments revealed that normalisation of ‘white time’ leads to unequal access to resources for both white and racialised doctoral supervisors. Theoretically, it contributes by pinpointing how time is racialised as well as how race is temporalised in doctoral supervision.
The rise in online shopping can be largely attributed to its unmatched convenience, offering consumers the flexibility to shop from any location, at any time. It is widely assumed that online shopping saves time by eliminating the need to physically search for products, queue at checkout counters, and deal with crowds in physical stores. However, the evolving time efficiency of online shopping compared to traditional in-store shopping has not yet been empirically analyzed, leaving a gap in understanding time efficiency and how it has changed. This study aims to bridge that gap by analyzing time spent shopping both in-store and online from 2003 to 2023, utilizing data from the American Time Use Survey. The findings reveal that, in 2003, consumers were able to complete the equivalent of 1 h of in-store shopping in just 35 min online, falling to 15 min in 2023. Over the past decade (2013-2023), the average American has saved a total of 25 h per year due to the time efficiency of online shopping. An experience curve model was applied to characterize past trends and project the future. The resulting learning rate is between 12% and 19%. Using this in a projection suggests that 9.2-11.2 min of online shopping will be needed to replace 1 h of in-store shopping in 2030. Changes in time and money spent online versus in-store have implications for consumer activity patterns, time allocation, purchases, and building use. Increasing efficiency reflects a growing orientation toward speed and immediacy, reshaping shopping as a more instrumental practice, distancing consumers from the social and leisure aspects of shopping, and contributing to ongoing processes of temporal acceleration in everyday life.
In this paper, I consider the concept of trans dissociative time through the lens of madtime, aiming to understand how dissociative temporalities both structure the transnormative life narrative in ways that bind it to chrononormativity and can be leveraged to resist this narrative. I characterize three qualities of trans dissociative time: 1) frozen , as time is stopped or paused in the present; 2) split , as the lifespan is divided into multiple subsequent or simultaneous narratives; and 3) blurred , as temporal boundaries are made fuzzy or disoriented. I use the lived experiences of myself as a transmasculine nonbinary person and friends who are a trans system in conjunction with scholarship on Mad, trans, queer, and crip times to discuss the nuance of trans dissociative time as not only distressing and normalizing, but also a site ripe with possibilities for resistance to the sanism embedded in compulsory, normative linear temporalities.
Temporal patterns in energy demand are becoming increasingly central to managing supply and demand in energy systems based on renewables. While past research has used either time-use surveys or high-resolution electricity use data to examine associations between energy peaks and everyday practices, these sources are rarely combined. This paper combines time-use survey data, including practices and appliances, with hourly electricity use data to investigate the association between the timing of everyday practices and energy demand in Danish households. Although the datasets were collected in different years, their combination offers new insights into the temporal alignment between domestic practices and peak electricity consumption. Focusing on the 5 to 8 pm evening peak period, the study examines four key practices (relaxation, cooking, housework, and caring) and nine common appliances, including the TV, coffee machine, and dishwasher. The findings challenge conventional assumptions that associate evening electricity peaks primarily with dinner preparation. While cooking is the most frequently performed activity during peak hours (60%), its direct contribution to peak consumption appears limited. Instead, practices such as housework, often involving energy-intensive appliances, emerge as more significant contributors. This reframing directs analytical attention away from isolated appliance usage toward the temporal coordination of multiple, overlapping practices. By directly linking the timing of activities with observed electricity demand, the study shows that evening peak loads arise from the temporal coordination of overlapping practices rather than isolated appliances. The analysis reveals that housework, often involving several energy-intensive appliances, contributes more to peak demand than cooking, despite cooking being the most common activity during this period. This highlights the importance of understanding appliances as mediators within bundles of practice.
In this introduction to the special section, we outline the central questions that animate our concerns about the diverse forms that temporal turbulence is taking in the context of intensifying climate change and precipitous biodiversity loss: Does the contemporary conjuncture of 'colonial-ecological crisis' compel a more thoroughgoing review of ideas about time and temporality across the disciplines? What relationships exist between the long dur & eacute;e of European colonialism and ongoing environmental collapse in different parts of the world? How are dominant actors - legal, political and corporate - seeking to disable or dilute challenges to long-entrenched temporalities, both colonial and capitalist? And why is temporal multiplicity or 'pluriversality' so important in the contemporary conjuncture, not only for conceptualizing the world-historical processes that have precipitated this polycrisis but also for the possibility of new affective orientations and more creative policy innovations? As the four contributions to this special section demonstrate, albeit in relation to different institutions, in different registers and drawing on different disciplinary knowledges, there is an urgent need to both conceptualize and seek strategic solutions for the eco-political challenges of our time in more temporally plural, expansive, multi-directional, relational, moral and decolonial ways. While the climate crisis is often treated as a technical problem - or at least one amenable to forward-looking solutions that do not require wrestling with colonial pasts or neocolonial presents - the contributions to this special section all suggest otherwise. Taken together, they argue for a powerful reimagining of the temporal coordinates, assumptions and logics that characterize the present moment, and they gesture towards new temporal practices that might prove more genuinely responsible (and responsive) in the face of intensifying political, social and ecological turbulence.
This article examines how female employees experience temporal change under a four-day workweek in a childcare non-profit organisation. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, it analyses the lived temporal experience of reduced work-time. The findings reveal a paradox: while the four-day workweek promises temporal liberation, women's experiences often involve a form of temporal recolonisation, whereby free time is rapidly absorbed into existing webs of gendered obligations. The analysis shows how temporal interdependencies across work, family, and institutional schedules constrain how this time can be experienced, with inequalities amplified rather than reduced. Women with fewer resources face intensified temporal coordination burdens, while those with greater educational and economic capital navigate temporal tensions with more autonomy. Participants express ambivalence about changes organisationally framed as successful, revealing tensions between rest and productivity, autonomy and obligation, individual benefit and collective coordination. By developing the concept of temporal recolonisation, the article explains how work-time reduction, when detached from broader temporal ecologies and gendered expectations, can paradoxically reinforce the very inequalities it seeks to address. This contributes to scholarship on temporal inequality by showing that reduced working hours redistribute temporal resources unevenly, rather than simply creating free time.
This article examines how legal processes shape the pursuit of just energy transitions, highlighting the judiciary's role in balancing climate goals, Indigenous rights, and environmental justice. While court cases can play a crucial role in enabling Indigenous peoples to assert their rights, the outcomes hinge on the judiciary's ability to understand the cultural and relational significance of Saami reindeer herding. Using courtroom ethnography, I observed the & Oslash;yfjellet wind power court case in the Saami reindeer herding district of Jillen Njaarke S & iuml;jte. The article explores how Norwegian courts interpret and adjudicate culturally embedded claims to land and sustainability. Through a structural narrative analysis, the article identifies three interconnected narratives of temporal-hermeneutical injustice: establishing interpretive power through procedural exclusions, flattening relational Saami knowledge into administrative evidence, and marginalizing the ecological entanglements of land and herding routes. The analysis demonstrates how linear legal chronologies render Saami relationality legally unintelligible, perpetuating epistemic hierarchies. True justice requires reorienting collective interpretive resources to validate autonomous Indigenous temporalities, cosmologies, and onto-epistemologies, not as colonial contrasts but as sovereign frameworks. By positioning time as a structural site of power and resistance, this study advances scholarship on temporal-hermeneutical justice and energy transitions.
Rhythmanalysis and the way it is conducted is a theoretical concept and also a relatively novel framework using plural methodologies, often less grounded methods, on the border between various social sciences and philosophy. This paper elaborates on the rhythmanalytical approach developing a specific methodological framework that describes how to combine different, mostly empiric methods to achieve methodologically enriched results. The strength of such research is in the well thought-through combination and synergy of the methods used. It presents an empirical, methodological grasp on rhythmanalysis while it respects its phenomenological foundations and challenging character, as this field can always benefit from the updating of the methodological approaches.The paper describes the application of such a framework in the context of the recent urban development of the Sm & iacute;chov district in Prague. The focal point of the study, the Sm & iacute;chov train terminal, was explored for rhythm-related phenomena at the very beginning of a significant transformation of the railway station. Documentary analysis was accompanied by semi-structured interviews, structured observation as well as time-lapse photography. This paper explains the specifics of each method, explores how they complement each other and evaluates it by presenting its advantages, disadvantages and recommendations for future use. Furthermore, it coins the concept of rhythmic anchors and renders outlooks and tenets applicable to future rhythmanalytical explorations including ethical considerations related to rhythmanalytical inquiries.
Language prescription - political efforts to produce and maintain language norms - has been integral to modern governance. Pursuits of linguistic homogeneity can be traced through numerous pedagogical programmes, reform projects, and ventures of national consolidation. This essay argues that historical cases of orthographic standardization - that is, prescribed protocols of spelling - must be understood as examples of temporal synchronization. By mapping out the principal incentives of a comprehensive spelling reform carried out in early twentieth-century Sweden, the analysis connects the rationality of standardization to situated experiences of temporal disorder, asynchronous rhythms, and conflicting timescapes. The central argument is that orthographic reforms produce unified historical time in order to align a series of conflicting temporalities. Implementing analytical frameworks of temporal multiplicity and synchronization, the article accentuates a previously understudied relationship between spelling reforms and strategic constructions of historical time.
This article establishes duration as a distinct normative temporal structure that influences life course transitions, expanding beyond the predominant focus on age norms in existing literature. Drawing on life story interviews with 55 individuals in Shenzhen, China, the study examines how duration norms - socially constructed expectations about how long particular life course stages should last - operate in the transitions from relationships to marriage and from marriage to childbearing. The findings show that duration norms exhibit three key components of social norms identified in classical theories: specific behavioural expectations, collective consensus, and sanctions for violations. Through detailed analysis of participants' narratives, the research reveals how duration functions as a malleable yet powerful normative framework that interacts with age and sequence norms to collectively structure family formation decisions. The qualitative approach captures the lived experience of duration norms, including how they are felt, interpreted, and negotiated in everyday decision-making processes during life transitions. By establishing duration as a critical dimension of temporal norms, this research advances our understanding of how time structures social life. These findings contribute to life course theory, the sociology of time, and empirical understandings of family formation processes in contemporary urban China, demonstrating how duration norms constitute a previously undertheorised yet significant aspect of temporal regulation.
In 1987, the UN report Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland report, was published by a group led by its namesake Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Norwegian prime minister and chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development. The group had been tasked with solving an increasingly difficult and contradictory problem. As knowledge about anthropogenic impact on the global environment was mounting-James Hansen would testify to the U.S. congress about the reality of anthropogenic climate change the following year-these insights needed to be integrated into the trajectory of global development that had been pushed since the early postwar era by Western nations. At the heart of this process was the clash of different temporalities; the political, social, and human historical on the one hand and the temporalities of the Earth and its systems on the other hand. In this article, I ask how these clashing environmental and social temporalities were made commensurable with each other through the concept of sustainable development that engendered certain energy futures. Through which conceptual tools, quantitative measurements, predictive models, and projections were the planetary limits which supplied the framework for life on Earth made to appear possible to overcome with a certain form of economic development? The article starts with a broad outlook over the political ecology of sustainable development in the global policy context in the early years of implementation, and then moves into the empirical case of the Swedish forestry which became a key asset in the country's journey toward net zero emissions over the decades from the 1990s onwards.
Western law does not merely operate within time; it actively produces a singular, linear temporality that functions as an ontological infrastructure for erasure. This paper analyzes the chrononormative straitjacket, an Enlightenment-era inheritance from Cartesian-Newtonian mechanics, that embeds linear bias into the very architecture of legal reasoning, from statutes of limitation to causation tests. By prioritizing immediacy and definitive closure, modern jurisprudence inflicts temporal violence, rendering non-linear harms, such as the slow violence of climate collapse and intergenerational colonial trauma, legally invisible. Anchored in an inclusive synthesis of Indigenous relational temporalities, chronobiology, and complexity theory, this research advocates for a paradigm shift toward polytemporal legality. This transformative framework de-centers finality as a primary virtue, instead operationalizing a multi-scalar, epistemically humble jurisprudence capable of recognizing cyclical and ancestral temporalities essential for securing justice in the Anthropocene.
