Time & Society

This article addresses the co-existence of rigid punctuality and a rubber-like flexibility in the Japanese conception of time. It examines how the clock and social norms shape the everyday use of time related to railways, work, and appointments in Japan. It demonstrates that multiple discourses of time and the complicated interactions among them create temporal complexity in which the seeming contradiction between rigidity and flexibility is compromised. The data derive from long-term participant-observation research among Japanese in Japan and abroad.

Japanese high-school students often study until late into the night and sacrifice their sleep in order to pass entrance and other exams. On the other hand, they often take a nap in the (late) afternoon, and daytime napping or inemuri is widely tolerated. This article asks what cultural and social sense it makes to keep students up for studying, when they cannot concentrate on what is being said in class. It examines notions of time and diligence based on the ethnographic findings and analyses sleep, especially inemuri, from sociological perspective.

This article investigates the time use and consciousness of a group of housewives working for Maple, a Japanese network business organizing 200,000 housewives all over Japan. The three years of fieldwork show that the invisible time organization of the housewives has been a vital obstacle to their business success. However, the article argues their time organization does not derive from static gendered time consciousness but it is rather produced and reproduced at the local level, through ideologies, discourses and practices.

This article discusses how time is conceptualized among hikikomori, or Japan’s so called ‘socially withdrawn youth’, through the narratives of hikikomori keikensha (those who experienced hikikomori) and also examines time and space management in hikikomorisupport context based on ethnographic data. Hikikomoriis an act of retreat from time and space constraints in society. Hikikomorisupport groups provide a place for them to be without feeling such time constraints, but this is not considered sufficient to get hikikomoriback into society. Hikikomori, which challenges the usual coordinates of time and space, may be understood as a kind of reaction to time pressures and role performances in Japanese society.

This article may be seen as in search of time but with no ‘real’ prospect of finding it since it is believed that time reflects and reinforces the relations in which it is embedded. The article will focus on pastimes, professionalism, and politics, arguing that while these diverse activities would appear to have no more than their alliteration in common, they share a similar orientation to time that is informed by a phenomenological consciousness of intentionality. This involves a linear sense of time as representing the gap that can only be bridged by intentions being realized instrumentally in specific results through means-end chains. Time then becomes filled up with activities that leave little space for reflection. This raises some issues regarding time that, outside of philosophy and even there only occasionally, would not ordinarily be aired. Some of these issues will be ethical, epistemological and methodological. The ethics will be drawn through an examination of Levinas’s misgivings about the phenomenology of Heidegger, the epistemology and methodology from some deliberations on time in relation to Foucault’s discourse on epistemic regimes, and methodology as one possible implication of those deliberations.

Digital technologies globally interlink finance, production, consumption, mass communication, and cyberculture. The processes of interlinkage generate the sense that time is accelerating towards instantaneity. Promoters and critical observers of such developments have created a proliferating discourse of ‘real time’. This key phrase and its associated terminology covers a diversity of referent spaces (e.g. cyberculture, financial flows, supply-chain management, on-line selling, live media events). In the context of global capitalism, discursive constructions of ‘real time’ are interrelated with new temporal constructions of systemic power. The nature of this interrelationship is obscured by the ideological features of ‘real time’ terminology. Here, this argument will be developed with references to popular business literature and (supposedly) critical academic writings. I conclude with a set of preliminary requirements for an effective critique of ‘real time’.

This article investigates to what degree the standardized life cycle has been replaced by an individualized life course, characterized by the absence of a strict sequence and timing of life's transitions. In order to measure the normative position of people, rather than the external conditions to which they are subject, the test is based on the ideal life course or life cycle as described by a purely random sample of 4666 inhabitants of Belgium, aged 18 to 36. The available evidence overwhelmingly points towards the persistence of a standardized ideal life cycle, characterized by a strict sequence and timing of the important transitions.

Intimate relationships are forged on and sustained by the appreciation of mutually significant events. When someone is missing, as a result of a reportedly unmotivated absence, expectations of the continuity of relationships are disrupted. Using data from publicly available texts I examine how people experience such an absence. Harvey Sacks’s notion of the ‘private calendar’ helps explicate how remaining family members experience literal and figurative desynchronization that suggests missing might be more potently understood as waiting. Finally, it seems that the duration of the absence helps family members account for the enduring lack of communication.

This article adopts a point of view of practice theories and elucidates how temporal orientations commence in the interactions of humans and the material world. Empirically the article focuses on the contemporary practices of wooden boating. Such practices offer a variety of different temporal orientations, which include emancipatory uchronias, flow states, altruistic care of common heritage and craft identities of mastering traditional skills. These positions within wooden boating result out of a distinct historic development. The practices of wooden boating also frequently imply stress and heavy toll on time, and entail subtle negotiations between self-determination and duties as a practitioner.