Time and Social Theory

In her critical study of sociology’s understanding of time, Barbara Adam contrasts the multiform experience of time in life with the much thinner understanding of time in theory:

“In everyday life . . . time can mean a variety of things. We can have a ‘good time at a party,’ be ‘on time for work,’ ‘lose time’ due to illness, choose the ‘right time’ to plant potatoes, and even live on ‘borrowed time.’ We can make time pass quickly or slowly, which is different from getting impatient because we have to wait or from feeling rushed because time is passing too fast. We need to distinguish between getting old and feeling old and between planning one’s day as a pensioner or as a university student . . . .

“We move freely between those varied sorts of time without giving much thought to the matter, using the idea as if it were a unitary concept. We do not fuss over the differences, and it does not seem to concern us that the time of our imagination knows no boundaries, that the time of our thought is open-ended but has a beginning, or that our sentences are bounded by both a beginning and an end.”

We expect social scientists to bring this multiform time into conscious consideration, but Adam says that this isn’t what happens. Instead, social scientists reflect little on time, and in their theories they take it largely for granted or, frequently, ignored. For many theorists, “the social world is explained in terms of either how it is, how it is changing, or how it ought to be; how it is structured, or how it is developing, timeless, or timeful. Functions are explained as frozen realities without time or temporality.”

Social science tends to force an either-or approach to time: “Time is accordingly understood as either social or natural, as a measure or an experience, as cyclical or linear. It may be associated with the clock or the rhythms of nature, with ageing and entropy, or with the timing, sequencing, and rhythmic organization of activities. With few exceptions, social theorists conceptualize as single parts in isolation what bears on our lives simultaneously.”

Adam quotes Anthony Giddens’s comment that social science tends to reify social structure by abstracting it from time. Stable social structures are not frozen timeless frames; they are precisely continuities in time. To say that a society has X structure is to say that the same pattern of life occurs at times T1, T2, T3, and so on.

All this suggests that Adam’s work dovetails nicely with Rosenstock-Huessy’s work on the multiformity of time.