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Time Work: Customizing Temporal Experience
Abstract
The literature on agency neglects temporality; the literature on temporality neglects agency. This paper integrates these largely separate lines of research with the concept "time work," which is defined as individual or interpersonal efforts to create or suppress particular kinds of temporal experience. Semistructured, open-ended interviews were conducted with 398 subjects, who were asked to describe ways in which they engage in time work. Analytic induction yielded five themes: in descending order of prevalence, the subjects reported efforts to control or manipulate duration, frequency, sequence, timing, and allocation. The variety and prevalence of time work suggests the sovereignty of self-determination; for the most part, however, time work contributes to cultural reproduction.
... However, it would be erroneous to assume that individuals are merely passive within this sociotemporal framework. Thus, Flaherty (2003) and Leccardi (2021) emphasize the concept of "time work" to underscore the active role individuals play in managing and organizing their time-related activities. ...
... Although chilling is strongly connected to specific temporal experiences and agency, as young people must reschedule socially accepted timetables to regain control over their time, these modes of "time work" (Flaherty, 2003;Leccardi, 2021) have yet to be analyzed. The following section will introduce empirical findings on the temporal experiences of chilling in peer groups and patterns (or modes) of rescheduling within these groups. ...
... Analyzing youth cultural practices as time work allows for an identification of power hierarchies and underlying temporal regimes. Rather than conforming youth cultural practices to normative time assumptions, decoding practices such as chilling highlight the youth temporal experiences through the lens of a personal sense of time, flow, intensity, and boundaries (Flaherty, 2003). From this analysis, chilling as a mode of time work provides insights into injustice, as youth practices such as hanging out are dismissed as doing nothing. ...
The phenomenon of young people reclaiming their time by rejecting traditional expectations associated with specific roles and engaging in activities that are socially addressed to be devoid of purpose, such as hanging out and chilling, is complex and multifaceted. It encompasses a range of meanings and is not simply what others call a waste of time. While many adults consider this phenomenon as wasting time by “doing nothing” or something that can be done after fulfilling the student role, young people employ these terms to refer to activities such as socializing, engaging in leisure, or taking me time. In Germany, young people have increasingly referred to hanging out as chilling in recent decades. This paper starts from the assumption that social acceleration, including temporalization of time and daily life to ensure social synchronization and coordinated actions, is an important trend in contemporary societies. Against this background, the article aims to ascertain the extent to which chilling represents a youth cultural expression of “time work” insofar as young people demonstrate the agency to negotiate the complexities of life, particularly in how they perceive and interpret time, simply by chilling. The concept of time work offers a crucial lens for understanding the temporal experiences connected to chilling, particularly in relation to how young people grow up and navigate life's uncertainties. Thus, rather than a moment of doing nothing, this article contends that chilling is a central temporal experience during the youth phase as a form of “time work.” Accordingly, chilling should be seen as a youth cultural response to the decelerating demands of the youth phase; it offers the means by which young people regain structural control over their biographical time with peers.
... Time work involves customizing temporal experiences, defined as "one's effort to promote or suppress a particular temporal experience" (Flaherty, 2003, p. 19). This refers to altering, controlling, or personalizing temporal experiences, also known as temporal agency (Flaherty, 2017;Stoicescu & Flaherty, 2023), and is exhibited through changes in duration, frequency, sequence, timing, allocation, and the act of taking time (Flaherty, 2002(Flaherty, , 2003. On the other hand, time appropriation centers on how individuals perceive segments of time as part of their identity. ...
Appropriation involves rendering foreign and uncontrollable elements familiar and meaningful. This study introduces the novel concept of time appropriation, defined as transforming uncontrollable temporal segments into personally meaningful experiences and allocation of that temporal segment to oneself. We investigate this concept through three distinct studies. In Study 1, a qualitative study involving 15 participants, we used in-depth interviews to explore the intricacies and dimensions of time appropriation, identifying themes that emerged from participants’ descriptions via template analysis. Template analysis enables the identification of recurring patterns within and across participants, providing a flexible yet structured approach. Studies 2 and 3, with 371 and 988 participants respectively, focus on developing and validating a measurement tool for this concept, by survey methods to collect quantitative data ensuring statistical reliability and validity. Qualitative findings from Study 1 reveal that time appropriation encompasses dimensions such as identification, meaning, emotion, ownership, transformativeness, sociability, and the physical environment. Participants strongly identify with and find unique meanings in their appropriated time, generally experiencing positive emotions. However, emotional experiences varied among participants; while many reported positive emotions like satisfaction and contentment, a few described more complex feelings, suggesting that the emotional impact of time appropriation may not be uniformly positive but rather context dependent. Our participants exhibit high ownership and control, using these periods for psychological renewal and transformation within specific social and physical environments characterized by comfort and strong bonds. Quantitative results from Studies 2 and 3 demonstrate the successful development of the time appropriation scale, which includes key dimensions such as self-discipline, spontaneity, and inwardness. To ensure the scale’s reliability and validity, we applied factor analysis to identify the underlying structure and utilized Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega to establish internal consistency. Self-regulation, the satisfaction with life scale, Turkish subjective happiness scale, authenticity scale, and the meaning in life questionnaire were used in validity studies. The scale exhibits robust psychometric properties, confirming its validity and reliability. This research highlights the distinctiveness of time appropriation compared to other time-related concepts in the literature, such as time work, leisure, and time perspective. While the findings underscore the utility of the time appropriation scale, some limitations, such as the use of snowball sampling techniques as well as criterion sampling in the first study, the reliance on self-reported data in the second and third studies and the need to examine diverse cultural contexts should also be addressed. We discuss the theoretical implications, psychometric properties, and potential applications of the time appropriation scale.
... All students in this study were conscious of their temporal agency (Flaherty, 2003) and noted strategies to pace their learning while attending synchronous lessons and viewing video recordings of lectures, as well as over the course of the semester. Students' temporal agency ranged from controlling the pace of learning effectively to gradually losing control over learning progress. ...
Flexible online distance education enables students to interact with content and materials at their own pace and from any location. However, such individualization of students’ learning time and space masks differences between learners’ access to resources within their spatial environments and temporal contexts and, thus, might generate implicit forms of social inequity. This study examines how flexibility inherent to emergency remote online learning shapes how Israeli university students from different social groups experienced remote online learning during the Covid-19 pandemic. We thematically analyzed semi-structured interviews with 50 undergraduate and graduate students, representing diversity in terms of class, gender, and national categories. We found four spatial and temporal factors that shaped students’ ability to harness flexibility to benefit their emergency remote online learning: spatial capital, temporal capital, temporal agency, and temporal intensity. The analysis revealed how such factors were shaped by complex intersections between students’ social identities. This study suggests that higher education institutions should make flexibility inclusive and safeguard students from potential adverse effects by tailoring support to diverse student needs and ensuring consistent access to resources as needed.
... And once a step is completed, it is decided and done. But for these brides, COVID-19 and the corresponding government regulations resulted in their being unable to customize their temporal experience in this sequential manner (Flaherty, 2003). For these brides, their linear planning turned into a loop where they continuously had to redo some steps, then redo the subsequent steps. ...
While gender transitions are often discussed as a question of identity/body, this article examines them as a temporal issue. Gender transitions are not only chrononormatively located in youth as the life phase in which identity formation presumably takes place, but – regardless of an individual's chronological age – are often framed as a second puberty. The article argues that this is a specific use of time that works to contain gender/sex and regulate transitions. Drawing from a Germany-based ethnographic study, the article explores how gender transitions in youth and adulthood take place through arranging time. While timing seems integral to transitions, it appears to be impossible to transition at the right time: Every transition is always already late, foundationally rendered out of sync by the linear temporal organisation of identity. This is because trans is formed by marking it as change in gender/sex where chrononormative life course expects to be continuation.
Against this background, the article discusses gender transitions as time work entrenched in notions of youth and development. This time work imposes a teleology onto change and regulates and impedes transitions. The article shows that transitions are delineated by specific uses of time and theorises how time works to figure gender within modern linearity, suggesting that it is the assumption of linear time itself which makes it impossible for transitions to be on and in time and effectively displaces them from the present. Building on that, the article departs from common understandings of trans as incongruence of body/identity, venturing that the incongruence engendering transitions might be a temporal one. Concluding, the article considers whether for better trans politics, we need a different relation to time and move away from the linear segmentation of past/present/future, to make time for a trans presence that does not need to go anywhere.
Much has been written to address the increasing complexity of youth temporalities, especially through a focus on when adulthood is reached, an approach that informs the tradition of youth studies called “youth transitions.” This article discusses some of the shortcomings of this approach that were revealed during the global pandemic, through the social distancing measures that were put in place in response to it and how young people reacted to new imposed rhythms. The pandemic has predominantly been seen as a “suspension,” with implications in particular on two different temporal dimensions: on the one hand, young people have experienced profound changes in their everyday lives due to lockdown restrictions; and, on the other hand, at the biographical level, a search for alternative lifestyles has emerged, impacting on mid-term perspectives. These changes urge us to reconsider various phenomena of time suspension associated with youth, such as moratorium and waithood, paying attention to the value that young people attribute them. Borrowing from Flaherty’s work on time work, this article discusses various nuances of time suspensions that allow us to examine agency transformations during the pandemic. It does so by looking at a case study of young people in Italy, and how a disregard for the temporalities that are typical of value to youth appears to have taken place, based on documentary sources and qualitative material analyzed for a project called IANG. By reflecting on the changes in the ways of looking at young people during the pandemic, and zooming in on some rituals that were reworked due to lockdown restrictions such as the final school exam, I conclude that we should shift attention from “timing transitions,” to “times” in transition, and look more attentively at the meanings attributed to various forms of time suspension that make up youth through specific youth temporalities.
Using Steven Hitlin and Glen Elder’s theory of temporal agency and Elizabeth Grosz’s theory of feminist temporality, this article examines complex temporality and three female characters’ agency and negotiation with Confucian patriarchal gender norms in Zen Cho’s Black Water Sister (2021). Across different generations, three female characters—one millennial diasporic Malaysian Chinese girl, a local Malaysian Chinese ghost, and a Malaysian Chinese ghost/goddess—experience supernatural journeys to challenge Confucian patriarchal discourse. Diverse strategies of female agency concerning different temporal dimensions are reflected through the three female characters’ daily behaviours, resistance, and life choices. These behaviours and choices are shaped by their individual experiences and Confucian patriarchal gender norms at different times. By exercising female agency, three female characters immerse themselves deeply in the past or find a balance between memory and forgetting in order to heal the traumatic past or create a feminist future.
Time is a social construct often weaponized against marginalized people via waiting, imprisonment, and other forms of social control. In prisons, the length of one's sentence is something to be passed, overcome, or defeated. This paper seeks to understand how incarcerated women in jails—associated with awaiting sentencing or short sentences—experience time in the United States. Moreover, how do minoritized women experience and resist the time of imprisonment in such liminal spaces? I utilized participant observation, semi‐structured interviews, and visitations—in‐person and virtually—with women in a county jail. Their narratives elucidate that time was weaponized against them at three levels: (1) imprisonment itself, (2) through local and facility policies, and (3) via the manipulation of time by facility actors. Moreover, the women articulated how the weaponization of time was exacerbated for minoritized women and women who questioned their mistreatment. Finally, despite this weaponization, the women resisted the jail's temporal regime via intrapersonal tactics and interpersonal organizing. This was done in symbolic and meaningful ways tied to their intimate and embodied familiarity with jail time structures. They also resisted in substantive ways, alongside a community organization, which culminated in mutual aid programs, solidarity protests, and exposure of abuses in the jail.
This paper examines the intersection of two fields of study, rarely conjoined so far: time scholarship and migration theories. Building upon previous studies that have conceptualized social articulations of time, it aims to trace the intellectual progression of the field, including the major debates and the main thematic categories. By no means exhaustive, the present theoretical review on migration and temporality rests primarily on the works of Robertson (2015), Griffiths et al. (2013), King et al. (2006) and Cwerner
(2001) who are among the first scholars to theorize ways in which time or multiple temporalities inform migrants’ lives and ethnographic modes to investigate it. By conjoining all these research efforts together, I hope to demonstrate how a temporal approach on migration processes can enrich existing studies with in-depth insights about migrant subjectivities.
Network analysis is one of the most promising currents, in sociological research, and yet it has never been subjected to a theoretically informed assessment and critique. This article outlines the theoretical presuppositions of network analysis. It also distinguishes between three different (implicit) models in the network literature of the interrelations of social structure, culture, and human agency. It concludes that only a strategy for historical explanation that synthesizes social structural and cultural analysis can adequately explain the formation, reproduction, and transformation of networks themselves. The article sketches the broad contours of such a theoretical synthesis in the conclusion.
Strategies of research in the field are examined, with particular reference to quantitative documentation. To avoid fruitless contreoversy it is necessary to distinguish among frequency data, incidents (and histories), and institutionalized norms and statuses; and to recognize that the "participant observer" employs not one but three methods-participant observation, informant interviewing, and enumeration (or sampling). Three strategies are fundamental, according to criteria used here: enumeration to document frequency data; participant observation to describe indicents; and informant interviewing to learn institutionalized norms and statuses. Other strategies are not ruled out and nine that are frequently used are examined here.
A version of the research act, termed naturalistic behaviorism, is presented and compared to existing formulations of the
method. A sensitizing framework for organizing naturalistic studies is presented. Special attention is given the problems
of sampling, measurement, and causal analysis. Examples from an ongoing study of early childhood socialization are presented
as tentative solutions to the sampling and analysis issues. Central weight is given to introspective-investigator accounts
of social process.
Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or "tool kit" of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct "strategies of action." Two models of cultural influence are developed, for settled and unsettled cultural periods. In settled periods, culture independently influences action, but only by providing resources from which people can construct diverse lines of action. In unsettled cultural periods, explicit ideologies directly govern action, but structural opportunities for action determine which among competing ideologies survive in the long run. This alternative view of culture offers new opportunities for systematic, differentiated arguments about culture's causal role in shaping action.