Editorial

No doubt, human beings are temporal beings; they are processual in nature all the way down. Human identities and subjectivities, or more radically, human lives, are formed by the ongoing – and only sometimes explicit and conscious – struggle to negotiate between a multiplicity of temporalities: the temporalities and rhythms of our body, of environmental nature, of our everyday social lives, of our biography, and finally, of our epoch or historical age. The good life, it seems from this perspective, is realized when we manage to reconcile the patterns and horizons of all of these temporalities, and thus, to reconcile past, present and future in – and of – our lives.

The current issue of Time & Society sets its focus on the temporality of our life course. Thus, in the first contribution of the Special Section, Michael Flaherty explores how human agency and creativity in shaping and interpreting the temporality of our life course can be re-conceptualized as an ongoing individual and social ‘time-work’ which ‘negotiates’ between temporal norms and individual biographies. By contrast, Claire Bidart in her contribution turns to the methodology of longitudinal panel studies which obviously provide a pivotal starting point for empirical research trying to actually ‘map’ the processual nature of our life course temporality and its transitions. From another angle, Steve Janssen and his colleagues contribute to this topic, too, as they tackle the vexing and age-old question of why time appears to move faster and faster the older we get from a new and most surprising perspective.

The three remaining articles published in addition to those of the special section too of this issue nevertheless make significant contributions to the temporalities outlined above. No doubt, the temporality of work in many ways shapes and determines the time-structures of our everyday lives as well as of our biographies. Heike Ulferts, Christian Konrunka and Bettina Kubicek in their contribution explore processes of speed-up in technology, in the rates of social change and in the pace of life at the workplace of employees, thereby putting Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration to an empirical test. Furthermore, while Fang Ren, Mei-Po Kwan and Tim Schwanen explore the complex logics of our daily internet activities, which obviously reshape the patterns of our everyday temporalities to a most significant degree, Kevin Birth investigates how the temporality of historical epochs and of ‘imagined communities’ is constituted through the struggle over calendars and almanacs. Taken together, the articles collected here once more provide fascinating insights into the heterogeneity, variety and creativity of human temporality.