Abstract
In the end, we only know about time through the constant occurrence of change: We measure how it elapses by the movement of the hands of the clock, by the passing of the seasons, by the constant succession of night and daylight, or by the motion of the stars. Likewise with Time & Society. The motion of time and the beginning of a new era is signaled by a significant change in our book review section: Ida Sabelis and Laura Watts, our entrenched book review editors up to now, have decided that it is time for them to move on to new shores and to seek new challenges. The editors and readers alike are greatly indebted to them for all their efforts, time and competence they have put into the journal for many years now; through their work, they have substantially improved our review section in format, thematic scope and contents alike. We would like to express our gratitude here and surely wish them all the best for their future!
At the same time, fortunately, we are extremely pleased to welcome and introduce a whole new team of review editors who have taken over from Ida and Laura and who have started to work for Time & Society with great enthusiasm. They have all published in Time & Society before and count among the leading experts in contemporary social time-research: Marli Huijer, from the Faculty of Philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam; Gabriella Paolucci, from the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Florence; and Peter Peters, from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. We are very proud to have you on board and would like to give you a warm welcome!
Meanwhile, the special section of the current issue is devoted to the ever changing landscape of subjective time, i.e. to the fascinating as well as complex topic of psychological time. As our authors impressively show, the experience of time, the perspective on life itself and subjective well-being are intrinsically interwoven. Thus, while Hoppmann, Poetter and Klumb, in their investigation on “Dyadic conflict in goal-relevant activities”, explore the time-use patterns and scheduling strategies of employed parent-couples with respect to their ability to simultaneously pursue their goals on the one hand and their levels of well-being on the other hand, Malgorzata Sobol-Kwapinska, in her contribution on “Hedonism, Fatalism and ‘Carpe Diem’”, identifies three profiles of attitudes towards the present time she calls “Epicureanism”, “fatalistic hedonism” and “absence from here and now”. These attitudes, she argues, have significant consequences for people’s sense of well-being, meaning and purpose in life. From a somewhat different, but related perspective, Wei Zhang, Howell and Bowerman present an astonishing abbreviated version of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI) that serves to measure people’s sense of subjective time with just 15 instead of the originally 56 items.
With contributions such as this, we are confident to convince researchers and readers alike that Time & Society will continue to play a significant role in the study of subjective and psychological time, too!
The remaining three articles in this issue shift the perspective towards the spatio-temporality of everyday practices. While Ilenya Camozzi presents fascinating insights on how young Italian “Cosmopolitans” invent new strategies and create innovative practices to deal with accelerated and compressed forms of urban time-space-regimes, Matthias Gross and Alena Bleicher deliver a stunning study on how ignorance and non-knowledge can in fact become productive social resources to form relationships of trust and cooperation in local networks. Finally, Dale Southerton makes a convincing argument for the conceptual separation of routines and habits on the one hand and the temporality of everyday practices on the other. The issue is rounded off by two inspiring book-review essays which pick up the issue of change from two different perspectives: The first one on Kevin Birth’s book ‘Objects of Time’ explores the temporality of things, while the second one on a book edited by Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt stresses the role of memory in political change.