Time,memory and class: The unintended consequences of the bourgeois gaze

Abstract

In this article, I argue that currently there is a middle-class bias that dominates in sociological culture and structures the ways the discipline operates as a form of bourgeois gaze. These forms of regulation and structuration within the discipline are also visible in Paul Willis's book Learning to Labour (1977), and they need to be illuminated, problematized and challenged if the discipline is to be able to contribute meaningfully and critically to an enlargement of its approach to sociological analysis, including the analysis of class and youth culture. My attempt is to make an exposure and reconsider Learning to Labour through the lens of time, memory and class, by performing an additional reading of the ‘the lads’ orientation toward different temporalities and conscious practices of memory work.

Keywords

Paul Willis class time memory sociology bourgeois gaze

Paul Willis's seminal study Learning to Labour (1977) has been important to sociology, cultural science and educational science in many ways. It describes a particular group of, in relation to schooling, non-conformist white young men from the working class as they pass through the last two years of school and into work. They live with their families in a small industrial town in the midlands of England, where taking on manual work from one generation to another has been in its lived forms a self-evident act. In the study, they are called ‘the lads’. Described and analysed are their self-understanding as well as the role of culture in reproducing social structures, for example, and in my interpretation, how masculinities play out and strengthen the male working-class culture and how the lads to a certain degree understand and see through the capitalistic system and bourgeoisie values. Willis's description of the ‘partial penetration’ of the working-class lads and its paradoxical outcome has contributed to sociology because it shows that reproduction is more complex and intertwined in different landscapes of meaning (Reed, 2011; Lund, 2017) than we often imagine:

The tragedy and the contradiction is that these forms of ‘penetration’ are limited, distorted and turned back on themselves, often unintentionally, by complex processes ranging from both general ideological processes and those within the school and guidance agencies to the widespread influence of a form of patriarchal male domination and sexism within working class culture itself. (Willis, 2000 [1977]: 3)

One conclusion from Learning to Labour, which was also a common understanding expressed in the sociology of education at the time, was that there is a class-differentiated relationship to time where working-class lads are described as having a shorter temporal horizon that is occupied with the present compared to middle-class educationally more motivated youth. However, by rereading Learning to Labour, I found that an additional understanding of the relation of the lads to different temporalities could be gleaned in which members of the working class can also be identified as having distinct future orientations as well as engaged in memory work. For this reason I find it important to problematize questions of class and time, as doing so could have had implications for how we social analysts have come to view success through a class-biased lens with possible, unintentional, consequences for class structures. To try to accomplish this, the paper deals with time, memory and class. I begin with a personal account of time and continue with examples of how Paul Willis relates to temporalities in Learning to Labour. Then I suggest an additional reading of Learning to Labour. Throughout the article I discuss sociology and time before making my concluding remarks.

Childhood memories and sociological tales of a future-orientated method of improvement

I grew up as the youngest of eight siblings on a farm in the far north of Sweden. I thought about my future – about education, work, about taking part in politics, about love and family, travelling and leisure activities. Later, as a sociology student, I understood that such future orientations as these were theorized in an evaluative way: some were better and others worse. Groups without, or with smaller amounts of, cultural capital were perceived as having a short temporal horizon organized around the troubles and pleasures of everyday life. Groups with cultural capital, on the other hand, had a longer temporal horizon that was generally played out through plans and realizations of educational merits and achievement of a status position in work life.

Personally, I have never really been able to come to terms with this way of interpreting time and class. Time must be a more complex matter. And it also seems to be when I reread Learning to Labour. In the book, different temporalities work side by side in a way that I did not appreciate the first time I read it. This is what the present paper is about: time, memory and class. I also pursue this rereading from the perspective of trying to understand how we sociologists may have unintentionally contributed to reproducing class privilege as well as to cultivating political unrest. Through the article I will also try to give a cultural sociological explanation of the unintended bourgeois gaze residing inside sociology (see also Abbott 2016: 196). The larger contribution concerns how valuation and, one-sided, theorization of time could be part of social differentiation.

In past few months, I have been reminded of my early experiences of the tensions between lived everyday life and theories of everyday life when I revisited Learning to Labour. What struck me was that in Willis's famous work there are dimensions of memories and complex temporalities that deserves further analytical work. This made me consider that cultural structures connected to sociology, as a discipline, could be linked to values of upward mobility, and a ‘final, point-outcome measure’ (Abbott, 2016: 187):

It is a conception that devalues strong experience and overvalues caution, it is a conception that enforces future calculation and disregards memory. It favors lives with nothing to regret and, perhaps, nothing to remember. (Abbott, 2016: 196–7)

Ron Eyerman reminds us also of the link between modernity and sociology and the emphasis on the new, ‘by future, rather than past, orientation’ and hence, to ‘the idea of progress, but also that of freeing individual and society from the shackles of the past’ (2011: 305).

Sociology is characterized by a narrative. According to this narrative, there are dependent variables that have a time dimension and reach an end, i.e. an outcome (Abbott, 2016: 166, 182). But, as Abbott points out: ‘most of the outcomes we study are not really endings at all, but arbitrary ends selected for some reason that is not very well understood’ (2016: 181). As sociologists, we tend to compare people's lives in ways of ‘highly regulated aspirations’ (2016: 196) that also make value judgements. Because what happens to one individual is often seen as better or worse than what has happened to another (2016: 196).

As I was reading Willis's work and realized that there are dimensions of memories and futures in the lads’ lives that are not really accounted for in his analysis, I thought that this could also be seen in the light of, and in a general sense, the sociological tradition (Abbott, 2016). Taken-for-granted perspectives and theories in sociology make us more likely to see certain things and not see other things. There could be, to paraphrase Paul Willis, a ‘partial penetration’ in the discipline's way of understanding the usage of time and its (unintended) consequences.

In my concluding paragraphs, I will return to the topic of these unintentional consequences. My attempts to understand life trajectories and time have caused me to think about meaning and how humans are part of landscapes of meaning (Reed, 2011). These landscapes of meaning shape how we interpret events, situations and in a broader sense the nitty-gritty of everyday life and possible orientations toward the future. We can often be blinded by our own landscape of meaning and how that structures our analysis of an empirical material. Barbara Adam argues this in her book, Time and Social Theory (1990), when she describes how researchers' investigations of, for example the time horizon of the Native American Hopi tribe, unreflectively, used their own time culture, clock time, as the basis of reference (1990: 96).

If we wish to take landscapes of meaning seriously, we also need to take into account how individuals talk, interact and orient themselves in relation to time, i.e. different temporalities. This must be done open-mindedly and by not assuming that there is only one approach, i.e. a specific educational and occupational career path that is oriented toward the future and leads to success for individuals or social groups. Sociologists might alternatively use their work to broaden opportunity structures for individuals and groups with different conceptions of time and value. In the current state of society, a bourgeoisie life seems to carry better prospects for survival. So, even if there is more than one path in life and we could wish that these various paths could bring the same benefits, it may be that only the educated path in the end (at least with more certainty than other paths) is seen to generate a humane set of conditions.

Learning to Labour's take on time

Now, let us turn to Learning to Labour and revisit ‘the lads’ and their parents’ relation to time and memory. While rereading Learning to Labour, it struck me that the feeling I had as a young sociology student – a feeling that research perspectives in education and sociology on class conceptualizations of time were too one-dimensional – is also part of Willis's study of working-class lads in Britain. But I also realized that an additional reading may be an opportunity. Before we turn to my interpretations of time and the role of memory in Paul Willis's book, let us first consider how Willis himself interprets the lads’ relation to time:

Time is used for the preservation of a state – being with ‘the lads’ – not for the achievement of a goal – qualifications. Of course there is a sense of urgency sometimes, and individuals can see the end of term approaching and the need to get a job. But as far as their culture is concerned time is importantly simply the state of being free from institutional time. Its own time passes as essentially the same thing, in the same units. It is not planned, and is not counted in loss, or expected exchange. (Willis, 2000 [1977]: 29)

The presentism explained in Learning to Labour is connected to counter-culture – ‘a decisive rejection and closing off’ with regard to school coded expectations (p. 21). The school staff and the working class ‘ear’oles’, who are working toward school achievement, complain about the lads’ time conception. They think that the lads ‘waste valuable time’, as it is not linked to long-term educational or vocational careers (p. 28). The ear’oles’ hopes for the future are seen by the lads as conventional and passive. In addition, according to Willis, for the lads time is ‘something they want to claim for themselves now as an aspect of their immediate identity and self-direction’ (p. 29). Being boisterous, hanging out with the lads and especially violence – taking part in fights – are things that ‘strand you painfully in “the now”’ (p. 34). Here, the lads’ masculine ideals of ‘readiness and hardness’ also come into play (p. 150).

The lads also hold a strong vision about the coming freedom in manual labour, which is defined as the ‘future in the present’. This freedom is also, as Willis puts is, when ‘the gates shut on the future’ (2000 [1997]: 120), since creative forms of the counter-culture and its partial insights, on the cultural level, lead to ‘profound entrapments’ (p. 120). Time as explicated in the lads’ culture is, then, a ‘style of life’ of ‘immediate gratification’, as in the shop floor culture they are heading towards (p. 126). Thus, the lads’ relation to time is seen as a way of defeating the linear time of capitalism, which, according to Willis, is connected to their counter-culture and is understood as a partial penetration of the conditions the lads are caught up in.

According to Willis, for the lads, time is foremost connected to activities with friends and not directed toward achieving qualifications. Time is connected to being free from institutions, such as school. This is, of course, not to say that the working-class lads do not perceive a future orientation in other contexts, but Learning to Labour does not elaborate on such an orientation and does not offer a multidimensional explanation, from micro to macro, of the urge to be free from school time. I think that the focus on how reproduction take place is not open enough to how the lads are merged in more complex temporalities. As I read the book, the lads give examples of, rather conscious practices of, looking forward as well as back.

Sociology and its relation to time have been problematized by Bergmann (1992). In his literature review of class and time, he states that there is no clear evidence that different classes have different relations to time, and far less so than what ‘is generally believed’ (p. 89; see also support for this in Voyer, 2013). Nonetheless, there is a taken-for-granted understanding that individuals’ and groups’ time orientations can be differentiated along class lines. The working class, when presented by people from outside their class, is thought to be present orientated (cf. Jonsson and Beach, 2015). The middle class is expected to be future orientated (Bergmann, 1992: 86) and represents itself in that way (Jonsson and Beach, 2015). In sociology, the middle class future orientation is often operationalized through educational credentials or positions on the labour market. But the representation is more to do with the narrative of the gazer, what I come to talk of as the bourgeois gaze, than with the actual lived experiences and values of who is being gazed upon and spoken of.

Sociologist have suggested that lack of resources creates a shorter time period in which to see to one's own interests in an uncertain world, while groups with economic and cultural resources have more opportunity to make plans for the future (Bourdieu, 2000: 223, 227). In relation to the present situation and the precarization of the workforce, uncertainty, a lack of work predictability and a generally diminished sense of well-being have spread independent of class background (Sennett, 2007; Standing, 2013). This also points to the importance of social scientists having a sociocultural understanding of time (Sorokin in Bergmann, 1992: 85). How we experience time is connected, for example, to the institutions we are part of, specific events, and our life cycle, but also to a deeper cultural structure of shared meanings and feelings that can transcend but also be limited to a specific landscape of meaning.

An additional reading of time in Learning to Labour

Reading Learning to Labour again, I was surprised how the lads themselves spoke about their own priorities and sometimes put them in the perspective of a future, everyday life, where a counter-cultural event, such as going to the pub during the school day, is explained as an engaging memory to revisit. Thus, they are not at all presentist subjects per se, but it is what they become through the bourgeois gaze and narrative discourse when we focus on regulated aspiration, for example in regard to educational merits. In an interview mentioned in the book, the very last day of school is discussed. I understand what the interviewee describes as his planning for his future need for memory work. Practices are described in terms of how the future will be shaped through the lads' memories outside of school endeavours:

PW [Paul Willis]: Why was it important to get pissed on the last day?

Spanksy: It's a special thing. It only happens once in your life don't it? I mean, you know, on that day we were at school right, … school kids, but the next day I was at work, you know what I mean?

PW: Course, you went to work the very next day.

Spanksy: Yeah, I got drunk, had a sleep, and I went to work … if we hadn't've done that you know, we wouldn't've remembered it, we'd've stopped at school [i.e. instead of going to the pub], it'd've been just another day. No, when we did that, we've something to remember school by. (Willis, 2000 [1977]: 20)

In Spanksy's description, these above presented events, interpreted by Willis as counter-cultural practices (p. 21), become part of memory work. Instead of being in school, the lads spend their last lunchtime, at the end of their final school year, at the pub, drinking as much alcohol as possible. According to the lads, this is something worth remembering, as Willis also points out (p. 20). But it is also a narrative of how a counter-cultural practice, playing around in the present, can be a story for the future, and how this can take shape in a very conscious manner. This does not constitute a preservation of a present state or being free from institutional time (the lads want to remember school). Rather, the discussion illuminates a complex mix of different temporalities – the present in the future as well as thinking about how the past could be used in the present. According to Abbott, we have little knowledge in sociology that ‘helps us conceive of the impact of past events on present outcome (2016: 193). In my interpretation, memories from the past could make the present multidimensional. Control over the past is developed in a way that promotes a self-evident position in a specific social milieu. Memory plays a role in helping the lads look to the future (cf. Eyerman and Jamison, 1998). An orientation toward the future through memory also contains a story of continuity, because memories can be shared with future generations. How the counter-culture is integrated into memories that could be used in the future is described when a student named Will, in a group discussion, talks about his mother's choice to keep complaint letters from school authorities:

Will: Our mum's kept all the letters, you know, about like the letters Simmonday's [the headmaster] sent [about the drinking]. I says, ‘What you keeping them for?’ She says, ‘Well, it'll be nice to look back on to, won't it’, you know, ‘show your kids like you know, what a terror you was. I’m keeping ‘em, I am.’ (Willis, 2000 [1977]: 21)

Maintaining contacts between the soon-to-be past and the present is about creating subjectivities for the future. Memories, as Maurice Halbwachs (1980 [1950]), Eviatar Zerubavel (2003), and Ron Eyerman (2011) put it, are often social. Will learns a lesson about what is seen as worth remembering, as socially memorable within the culture of the family, and the note from the headmaster materializes the memory in the same way a photograph would have done. Photos make encounters possible, writes Gillian Rose, between the ‘here-now with there-then’. Her research on middle-class mothering practices and family photos show that ‘domestic space holds together through them, and does not disintegrate’ (Rose, 2003: 15), and here we can see that a similar process is found in working-class families. The letter of complaint becomes a bridge between different temporalities (Zerubavel, 2003: 5). It carries the possibility of memorizing traces from before, as a way to ‘materialize the there-then’ (Rose, 2003: 13), and become ‘reminders of connections, shared struggles, shared lives’ (Ahmed, 2017: 241).

Memory work strengthens the individual, but it can also be interpreted as a collective act with meaning that reinforces group ties, including collective class culture (cf. Halbwachs, 1980 [1950]). Remembered practices with cultural significance within working-class culture have had little consideration in the official historical narrative. ‘Contestation’, as Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robins put it, is then ‘clearly at the center of both memory and identity’ (1998: 126), not only at the level of the nation-state but also on an individual and group level.

The lads’ embodied knowledge of the future can, as will be exemplified below, create counter-cultural practices. Willis's observation is that despite the fact that career advice is offered, the lads ‘reject, ignore, invert, make fun of, or transform most of what they are given in career lessons’ (2000 [1977]: 92). When a career counsellor is doing his work of telling students how to behave if they want to get a job and a career, the lads’ reactions show that their own knowledge about work and the careers they see themselves in is better than the information the career counsellor is providing. The lads’ own culture is, as Willis writes, ‘the most influential guide for the future’ (p. 95). The present and the future situation in Willis's work is presented as a practice of continuation from one lived experience, at school, to another, at work (pp. 95–6).

[In a group discussion on careers sessions]

Spanksy: After a bit you tek no notice of him [the career counsellor], he sez the same thing over and over again, you know what I mean?

Joey: We're always too busy fucking picking your nose, or flicking paper, we just don't listen to him.

…

Spanksy: He makes the same points all the time.

Joey: He's always on about if you go for a job, you've got to do this, you've got to do that. I've done it. You don't have to do none of that. Just go to a place, ask for the man in charge, nothing like what he says. … It's ridiculous.

PW: What do you mean, in terms of what qualifications you may need?

Fuzz: Qualifications and everything, you don't, you just ask for a job and they give you the job. (Willis, 2000 [1977]: 92–3)

It also may be the case that the career counsellor is expecting the lads to have a short time horizon, and this expectation accounts for the way information is given. But the lads see through the career counsellor's expectations and react with resistance through counter-cultural practices while safe-guarding their own claim of a coming reality.

Future orientations can also be seen in conversations about love and partners. Even if the lads' notions of female sexuality are sexist and traditional (a discourse that they of course did not invent – sexuality and gender values are hierarchic and unjust historically and culturally), their thoughts on whom to commit to on a long-term basis show they are orientated toward the future. As Willis puts it:

The ‘girlfriend’ is a very different category from an ‘easy lay’. She represents the human value that is squandered by promiscuity. She is the loyal domestic partner. (Willis, 2000 [1977]: 44)

The lads are planning for a family, and the very act of thinking about a family entails having a future orientation. Spike, in an individual interview, says: ‘I’ve got the right bird, I’ve been goin’ with her for eighteen months now. Her's as good as gold. She wouldn't look at another chap. She's fucking done well, she's clean.’ (pp. 44–5). Naturally, their thoughts about what kind of partner would be suitable are in one respect connected to a specific masculinity, but this is also a way of building their legacy for the years to come.

We should not forget how the past contributes to present and future orientations (Bergmann, 1992: 96) – and if the lads in Learning to Labour have a family history of fathers with similar careers in school and work life, this is also something that influences the lads' way of looking toward the future.

In Paul Willis's book, we can also see how the so-called ear’oles have a different way of imagining the future. This reveals the relative way in which time is understood. Reading about how the lads were treated in diminishing ways by school staff, we can also imagine that they were not seen, as Mats Trondman puts it, as students who should have the opportunity to encounter teachers who can enable them to see themselves as individuals with capacities and who can create a learning process where these students can ‘learn so that you learn that you can learn’ (2016: 337). As Joey, one of the lads, depicts his encounters with teachers: ‘they're able to punish us. They're bigger than us, they stand for a bigger establishment than we do, like, we're just little’ (Willis, 2000 [1977]: 11).

This means that time also has an interactional component. Orientations to time may be influenced by whether the people we interact with see us as belonging to a category of individuals who have control over and are of importance to the future. This means that a future-oriented view of, for example, education is something you need to learn, not something that is mysteriously inherent in different sociocultural milieus (see, for example, Lund, 2015, 2017). Even if the lads do have a short time orientation in relation to education, it can be explained by factors within the landscape of meaning where class is lived – class culture – and without that landscape, for example, in the fact that the school is not recognizing the lads' cognitive capacity. A short time horizon in relation to education, as a way of being, comes then from inside the class as well as from outside, i.e. the educational institutions' way of thinking. Hence, class in itself does not explain a short or a long time horizon. Temporal landscapes have their explanation in different landscapes of meaning.

I have to agree with Willis, since his ethnographical illuminations do help us understand reproduction of class, how the mechanisms behind learning to labour are filtered both through cultural and social structures, re-creating a specific masculine working-class position. However, what the preceding examples actually display is that in the midst of this logic of reproduction it is also possible to show that the lads' temporal landscapes do not need to be understood in terms of a short time horizon.

There are examples in Learning to Labour showing that the lads are living for the future as well as the present: memories being constructed, forming insights that concern past, present and future. These cannot be understood as representing a short time orientation. The lads construe narratives in a quite conscious and explicit way, that transcends the present, since they deal with creating memories that point to the future and that can be reconnected to the past.

Accordingly, at the same time as the lads reproduce class, they also transcend the presentism that Willis argues is a significant explanation of reproduction – not valuing qualifications and seeing manual labour power as freedom. While explaining the reproduction of class, Willis is simultaneously reproducing a meaning system that takes for granted that working-class people are caught up in presentism, that is, that the future is in the present. However, the future is not only in the present, the present is also in the future – as the lads are working with memories for the future ‘me’ in, as I argue, a rather conscious way.

For this reason, Willis does not acknowledge that reproduction can take place despite future orientation. The reproduction of class cannot be explained when social analysts reproduce a meaning system that a priori ascribes to the working class a short time horizon. Maybe it is even possible to make the claim that the reproduction of the working-class position in Learning to Labour actually is strengthened by a long temporal horizon. Remembrance rituals and relics of class conflicts such as the letter from the headmaster could make mobility less of an option as the group sense of staying the same and sharing an identity over time become more salient (Halbwachs, 1980 [1950]). There could also be a potential in the interplay of these obscured temporal horizons: hidden possibilities for agency, for social and cultural change. With an acknowledgement of the ‘complexity of time’ (Adam, 1995: 66), we can better access, understand, and exploit such possibilities. When a social analyst focuses on outcomes, an occupational position or credentials, we may miss out on other processes and conjunctions of temporalities. Time, sociology and the bourgeois gaze will in the following paragraphs be discussed.

Sociology and time

Time can be perceived in many ways. For example, it can be perceived in relation to a life cycle, meaningful events and as institutional systems (years, semesters, holidays, retirement and so forth). Events/processes also have different time structures. Time can be self-determined or other-determined. Time can have the temporality of being episodic or be characterized by continuity (Bergmann, 1992; Adam, 1995). Moreover, the density of time, the content and the degree of activity, should be taken into consideration (Snyder, 2013). Here we need a cultural sociological understanding of time, as there could be cultural structures we are not aware of that influence how we value and perceive time and its content. These structures create binaries between sacred and profane ways of thinking about and valuing what the content of time should be. Let us take sociology as an example.

The history of sociology and its connection to the project of studying outcomes and improvement have influenced the discipline in a way that can cause us to see upward mobility as a rational or pragmatic choice (Abbott, 2016). And the dark sides of modernity – such as inequality, superiority and exploitation – have seen the possibility of ‘self-correction’ through education and general social development (Alexander, 2013: 148). Thus, education is seen as a dimension that is beneficial to individuals, groups as well as society as a whole. I think that the sociological method of often measuring individuals’ orientations toward time through the ideal of educational qualifications and occupational status has probably influenced the conclusions the discipline has drawn.

I am not saying that upward mobility is normatively wrong. And I do acknowledge the importance of a general welfare state – even if it is not equally valuable in common ways for all citizens. In international comparisons are Scandinavian countries to a higher degree making class mobility possible? Gosta Esping-Andersen and Sander Wagner conclude: ‘Children from poor families in Scandinavia are more than twice as likely to be upwardly mobile as are poor children in the US’ (2012: 475). The point I wish to make is that upward mobility could be seen as a sacred dimension in sociology – as the most rational or pragmatic path to follow. Perhaps we sociologists tend to get influenced by our own political, theoretical or professional positions as well as the taken-for-grantedness of how time is valued in society – obscuring our gaze of people's own understandings of the webs of significance that are important to them. For instance, if we put Learning to Labour into a sociocultural context, we can see its choice of perspectives as partly a result of the fact that it was written during the 1970s era of the Birmingham school, which was influenced by various movements and different interpretations in Marxian thought and with an interest in understanding reproduction of class differences in relation to the labour market.

There are theories of the 19th and 20th centuries that were part of intellectual strands of thought that believed in the ‘possibility of rational planning’ and reason, even if the whole picture is more complex and varied (Alexander, 2013: 11–12). As part of the tradition of the Enlightenment strong theoretical thought, such as Marxism and liberalism, connected to stories of ‘human progress’ (Hall, 2017: 118). I argue that belief in reason is visible in the value placed upon educational aspirations. This concretization of collective beliefs in rationality and reason could enhance a perception of individuals that are perceived as rational and deserving concerning their use of time as ‘us’, while others, culturally coded ‘timewasters’, become the polluted ‘them’. The practice of deferred gratification in order to plan for the future is generally culturally valued and even seen as the way people are being ‘assessed in their self-control, morality, and even their humanity’ (Adam, 1990: 125).

As a trained sociologist, one is also part of an academic system that values individual time, where collective ways of thinking about time become profane. That is, we should not let a group of friends or any other collective influence how we fill our time with content regarding specific future orientations. Our research perspective on time and class might be obscured by our own belief that time should be part of an individualized rational way of thinking about the future in terms of education, career choices and health. That is, sacred time is a time of density with a specific content. Activity, not ‘idleness and enjoyment, serves to increase His glory’ (Snyder, 2013: 250). Benjamin H. Snyder is referring to Max Weber and the Protestant culture's view of a good life as ‘focused, driven, energized, and constantly engaged in enriching activity. Because one's time should be full, it should never be wasted’ (Snyder, 2013: 250). Days that are not filled with density are not seen as valuable, but rather as irrational and without a legitimate claim on the future.

Thus, time is not free from the ‘nature of society’, here the cultural structures, as collective meanings in society that organize our life through time. Its measure, content and division affect us without us reflecting much about it. Let us consider what Émile Durkheim once wrote about time.

If one wants to understand a society's concept of time, one must consider not the individual's nature or consciousness, but the ‘nature of society’. (Durkheim in Bergmann, 1992: 83)

The history of sociology as part of a modernization project has influenced sociological questioning and theorizing about the uses of time in particular ways. Mobility through education and occupational structures is seen as a more or less self-evident path that everyone should take. This view could have unintended consequences. Perhaps we sociologists, between the lines in our work, run the risk of taking part in a cultural and social structure in which individuals who lack cultural and educational capital become devalued as anti-civil: irrational, wild-passionate and dependent (cf. Adam, 1990: 124–5). This way of narrating the working classes is also often a common story in popular culture such as in reality television, where people are taught to dress better, eat better, clean better and take care of their private savings in a better way – as a form of ‘moral surveillance’ (Skeggs and Wood, 2012: 108). This is in stark contrast to the civil values of rationality, self-control and autonomy, often connected to individuals with cultural and educational capital (cf. Alexander, 2006: 57). I would like to suggest an interpretation: what individuals and collectives fill their time and time horizons with has been one way of reproducing social differentiation, privileging the highest stratum of society through the binaries of civil and anti-civil motives. To be ‘socially saved’, and hence part of civil society, one must be seen as representing civil motives (Alexander, 2013: 111). These criteria for inclusion could explain why the density of time devoted to educational merits and career is seen, and felt, as the ‘right’ trajectory. As Willis himself puts it: ‘What kind of bourgeoisie is it that does not in some way believe its own legitimations? That would be the denial of themselves’ (2000 [1977]: 123). Our own survival, as sociologists, rests on believing in time density, credentials and of work where we, paradoxically, measure others’ time usage and outcomes.

We sociologists have a cultural structure to negotiate which suggests that a high density of productive activity is good. Sociologists of professions show that abstract labour is more socially esteemed than concrete labour by those whose professions are themselves associated with credentializing and specific training (Sarfatti-Larson, 1977; Abbott, 1988). Liah Greenfeld points to the status-determining role of intellectuals when she concludes that ‘the role professional intellectuals of middle-class origin played in the formation of national identity in some societies explains the high status they have since then enjoyed in them’ (1992: 22). Thus Greenfeld demonstrates that the idea of upward mobility as an anomaly was replaced by the ‘idea of a homogenously elite people – the nation’ (1992: 487). Thus, a desire for status and pride played an important role in the rise of the world as we know it, i.e. how nationalism came to define the ‘political structure of modernity’ (1992: 488).

Durkheim (1992) viewed professionals, in distinction to regular folk, as in an important position, with relevant experiences and civic values that could regulate between capitalist economy and the moral force of civil society. Investment of time for educational credentials is, thus, often positively coded outside as well as inside sociology. Hence, time and how we fill time with content are bearers of meaning that is connected to middle-class values. Meaning is built around binaries, which tend to include or exclude different behaviours. How time is valued as either sacred or profane could lead to social differentiation.

Sociology is not a value-free discipline. Its methodology enhances outcome-specific results and empirical fields that often direct our gaze to questions of hierarchical status positions regarding, for example, education and work. This helps create a value-laden measurement of time that run the risk of placing individuals not choosing an educational path in the category of the unworthy. Degrading a life lived without a step-by-step future-oriented plan for education and career constitutes violating the individuals who do not have such a plan – a plan that is socially sanctioned as the rational path to success. If one group thinks that another group differs both in values and in temporal landscapes (i.e. coded as an ongoing trajectory with visible goals), there is not much left to hold them together (cf. Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013). This could have consequences for how we have come to perceive the working class as more irrational than the middle class.

Has sociology then contributed to a view of the working class as the duped class, as the irrational class? Is the political right-wing backlash we see in Europe and the US also part of the binary of civil and anti-civil motives also upheld by a sociological cultural structure that strives to support the working classes, but does so by leaving no other options than to paint the middle-class position – the civil motive – as the only reasonable position to achieve? Could taking a closer look at how the usage of time is perceived and valued be one way of understanding the current challenges of defining the ‘nature of society’? As Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss pointed out, even abstract dimensions in life, such as time, are ‘closely connected with the corresponding social organization’ (1963: 52).

In Learning to Labour, Willis does not argue that the lads have no future orientation in areas of life beyond schooling, but his analytic emphasis is clear, since its focus in regard to time is connected to how the counter-culture strands them in the present. I see my work as an extension of Willis's, with an eye to the ways that the lads are partly consciously and explicitly oriented temporally, both to memories and futures. And I think that the implications of long temporal horizons for reproduction and potential social change alike could have been further analysed in the book and should be privileged in future work concerning issues such as social reproduction. Furthermore, the lads’ action ought not to be, Willis writes, romanticized as a way of preparing for ‘the grand march towards rationality and socialism’ (2000 [1977]: 122). Nonetheless, at the same time he writes about the lads’ culture as open-ended and non-static. Cultural reproduction, he asserts, ‘always carries with it the possibility of producing – indeed in a certain sense it really lives out – alternative outcomes’ (p. 172). Is there not a risk then that forms of cultural production among the lads were neglected, especially when their time conception and usage is primarily analysed in relation to outcomes with regard to social reproduction of manual labour?

I think that the way time is used by the lads deserves more attention. In a contemporary perspective linear time in a capitalist frame has also altered. This might be a feature of our historical moment. A break from the taken-for-grantedness of a linear model of progress has become even more important in our era of info-glut. Kristin Luker (2008) argues that we can no longer presuppose that young people proceed ‘logically from A to B to C’ (p. 10). Facts, fiction, and the past-present-future have changed from a ‘linear view of how the world is experienced’ and hence ‘should be studied’ (p.10). The rise of digital cultures could have meta-effects on how time works in young people's lives. This non-linearity in our social world is simultaneous with another strictly linear change: there is increasing pressure on young people (partially driven by the marketization of schooling) to make up their minds early as to what to do with their lives, to lock in educational aspirations and vocational careers – this is taking place alongside changes in postindustrial societies that have made it increasingly difficult to get ‘unskilled’ jobs.

Drawing attention to the unintentional ‘bourgeois gaze’ is my way of pointing to the class-coded system of thinking that biases sociological analysis regarding what counts as a future orientation. Clock-time and a value-laden assumption of how to fill time can often be seen in our ‘frame’, but things outside the frame require attention as well, and time and temporalities must be problematized. I am using my reading of Willis's arguments regarding time to make a simple point: that we should reflect upon the possible presence of a bourgeois gaze, and consider what it allows us to see. It seems possible that the cultural structure of this gaze made Willis miss out on, ignore, or deprioritize important aspects of what was going on in the everyday life of the lads. I argue that in contemporary societies we should reconsider, and should develop a new focus on and awareness of the ways that multiple and diverse time horizons and temporalities interplay in young peoples’ lives.

Conclusion

Learning to Labour helped me, heuristically, to consider how time can be used to distinguish people and classes from each other and how sociology as a discipline can play into that. On the one hand the intentional focus on time is a defendable stance for a humane set of conditions for individuals and groups that are most effectively pursued through education and typical rationality. Yet this is a rationality that is cultural and has deep roots in the discipline and may, on the other hand, be blind to the complexity of time and diverse temporal landscapes. The perception of time within social science could unintendedly reproduce social differentiation outside of the academy. Social groups not seen as ‘timewise’ could develop a collective consciousness that incorporates the awareness that their lives and memories are not seen by others as worth remembering. This may create a vulnerable ‘we’ – both on a group and societal level (cf. Eyerman, 2011: 305). I think we sociologists should try to understand what the unintended consequences for social life could be when we focus on results in terms of educational/occupational outcomes.

The aim of this paper has not been to say that society/social groups' ideas and practices should not be challenged. What I argue is that how particular meaning systems and categories are construed can make the outcomes of such challenges harder. It might lock people into certain given categories rather than unlock those categories. This could be the case through the way social analysts might be informed by landscapes of meaning that shape the analysis beforehand, for example, when it comes to temporal landscapes and class cultures. How different landscapes of meaning understand time can be used as a way to distinguish between people and classes. As much as we, social analysts, are here to challenge notions of the social world, we should also challenge our own belief structures. So even when we as sociologists are motivated by the desire to create humane sets of conditions for everyone, we should also be aware of what ticks and is appreciated by the social worlds we study, how it is expressed and what the potentials are for social recognition. And in relation to class privilege, we should generally be more concerned about class-constrained agency to choose certain paths in life – be they upwards, downwards or stable.

Orientations to time differ across cultures and across history, but certain cultural values and ideas forms and mediate in favour of certain temporal orientations. I argue that there is an inherent bourgeois gaze within sociology that shapes sociologists' interest in the valuation of how time is used and, hence, the social hierarchization of outcomes. But, as I have tried to show in this paper, cultural structures of time are deeper than classes. We are all engaged in memory work and have thoughts and dreams about the future – whether it is in the British Midlands or in the far north of Sweden. In order to really understand other class temporalities, and their influence on reproduction as well as change, there is a need to step out of constraining middle-class sociological cultural structures to see beyond the, unintended, bourgeois gaze – meaning that perhaps we have to regulate our own regulations as sociologists.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Jeffrey Alexander, Phil Smith, Mats Trondman, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Andrea Voyer, and the participants of CCS North and CCS Spring Conference, Yale University, 2017, for valuable insights and discussions on the meaning of time, memory and class. Many thanks as well to the reviewer for excellent feedback and advice.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Anna Lund is associate professor in Sociology at the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Stockholm University; she is also faculty fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. Her work incorporates cultural sociological perspectives utilized across various empirical fields and in her current work Lund is investigating the social and cultural dimensions of opportunity structures for migrant youth in Sweden. Her next book, co-edited with Jeffrey C. Alexander and Andrea Voyer, considers historical and current conditions and challenges to the Nordic civil sphere; it will be published in 2019.?

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