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Analysing The Temporal Organization of Daily Life
Analysing The Temporal Organization of Daily Life
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What is This?
Sociology
Copyright © 2006
BSA Publications Ltd®
Volume 40(3): 435–454
DOI: 10.1177/0038038506063668
SAGE Publications
London,Thousand Oaks,
New Delhi
ABSTRACT
There is a tension in time studies between measuring and accounting for the
changing distribution of units of time across social activities, and explaining
temporal experiences. By analysing in-depth interviews with 27 people, this article
employs a theory of practice to explore the relationship between respondents’
‘non-work’ practices and five dimensions of time. It hypothesizes that practices
which demand a fixed location within daily schedules anchor temporal organiza-
tion, around which are sequenced sets of interrelated practices. A third category
of practices fills the gaps that emerge within temporal sequences.The most signif-
icant socio-demographic constraints (gender, age, life-course and education) that
shaped how respondents engaged and experienced practices in relation to the
five dimensions of time are then considered. It is argued that the relationship
between different types of social practices, five dimensions of time and socio-
demographic constraints presents a conceptual framework for the systematic anal-
ysis of differential temporal experiences.
KEY WORDS
constraints / co-participation / duration / periodicity / practice / sequence / syn-
chronization / tempo / temporal rhythms
Introduction
T
here is a tension in studies of time between measuring and accounting for
its changing socio-economic organization and understanding how different
social groups experience it. The tension is most evident in contrasting
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Much has been written about time, about the changing distribution of practices
within a 24-hour day (particularly between broad categories of leisure, personal
care, paid and unpaid work), and how economic policy and technological inno-
vations affect such distributions. Most studies start with a substantive issue as
their primary focus and concentrate on the dimensions of time explicitly rele-
vant to that issue (for exceptions see Adam, 1990; Zerubavel, 1979). Rather
than review studies of time according to the substantive issues that they address,
this section re-casts them in light of Fine’s (1996: 55) five dimensions of time:
Periodicity refers to the rhythm of the activity; tempo, to its rate or speed; timing to
the synchronization or mutual adaptation of activities; duration, to the length of an
activity; and sequence to the ordering of events.
Like Adam’s (2000: 135) ‘timescape’ framework, Fine’s five dimensions make
‘explicit and recognize time’s multiplex function and expression’. Both
approaches shift analytic attention away from time as a unit of measurement
and focus on how its multiple dimensions relate to, and in doing so construct,
the temporal rhythms of daily life. While Fine’s five dimensions are sub-
sumed within Adam’s more encompassing timescape framework (the temporal
equivalent of landscape), Fine’s approach is most applicable to an analysis of
practice because each dimension allows for systematic comparison between the
temporal components of different practices.
Duration
Time diary studies, which employ time diary data to record and measure the
number of minutes devoted to activities, represent the most comprehensive
accounts of duration. Gershuny (2000) employs diary data to account for pat-
terns of convergence and divergence of time use across different countries,
social classes and gender, and to highlight how various politico-economic
regimes produce different forms of temporal organization. Other accounts
focus more explicitly on ‘time famine’. Robinson and Godbey (1997) demon-
strate that despite having more ‘free time’ in 1995 than 1965, Americans para-
doxically reported feeling more ‘rushed’. Schor (1992), on the other hand,
explains the economic benefits for firms of training a limited number of em-
ployees who work long hours as opposed to a larger number of employees who
work limited hours. The workforce is willing to work for longer durations
because, Schor argues, people value their consumption relative to others and
global consumer culture places the lifestyles of the most affluent as the key con-
sumer referent group. The logic of global capitalism is that people work more
to consume more. Diaries have also been used to explore the changing condi-
tions of leisure, domestic divisions of labour, the emergence of new activities
and decline of others. However, the duration of activities remains the primary
focus of analysis.
Some ethnographic accounts focus on duration. Kunda (2001) and
Rutherford (2001) suggest the professional middle classes, especially female
members, face anxieties of increased workplace competition in the context of
their commitment to pursuing a professional career. In both accounts, the
importance of being seen as dedicated to the job, believed to be the principal
discriminating characteristic for upward mobility in the industries studied, led
workers to adopt strategies of working for long durations.
Tempo
Kunda’s and Rutherford’s accounts also highlight the importance of tempo: to
symbolize commitment employees increased the tempo of their work. It is,
however, in theoretical accounts of time-space compression that tempo receives
most attention. Scheuerman (2001) discusses three forms of acceleration asso-
ciated with time-space compression: technologies, particularly in relation to
transportation, communications and production; social transformations; and
everyday life. Together these processes produce an intensification of activities
and experiences, because spatial constraints on the timing of activities have
been compressed and individuals exposed to an ever-expanding plurality of
lifestyles instantaneously amenable through global information and communi-
cation technologies and the rapid distribution of global commodities (Giddens,
1991; Harvey, 1990). It is in this context that Darier (1998) suggests contem-
porary lifestyles are experienced as demanding of a need to experience ever-
more cultural activities, and, subsequently, being busy and conducting practices
at a fast tempo becomes symbolic of a ‘full’ and ‘valued’ life.
Sequence
Sequence refers to the order in which activities are conducted. It is a dimension
of time found in debates surrounding the changing distribution of time spent
in paid and unpaid work. It is suggested that women in dual income house-
holds experience a ‘dual burden’ as a consequence of ‘juggling’ both paid
employment and continued responsibility for domestic matters (Thompson,
1996). A symptom is that women ‘multi-task’ and by inter-weaving the con-
duct of many tasks the sequence of activities is altered (Sullivan, 1997).
Hochschild’s (1997) ethnographic study of a major American corporation fur-
ther develops this point. She relates increased durations of paid work, which
result from the intensification of global capitalism, to qualitative changes of
temporal experiences in the home. She argues that as hours of paid work
increase (what she calls the first shift), time for domestic matters (the second
shift) is squeezed, creating the need for a ‘third shift’ whereby people attempt
to create ‘quality time’ for their loved ones. This is a process of rationalization
because the principles of Taylorization, whereby tasks are broken down into
their component parts (fragmented) and re-sequenced to maximize temporal
efficiency, have become applied to domestic activities. Overall, increasingly
more spheres of daily life are regulated by principles of the efficient sequenc-
ing of tasks within designated slots of time.
Synchronization
Bittman and Wajcman (2000) demonstrate important gender distinctions in the
quality of leisure time based on the synchronization of different activities. They
distinguish between ‘pure’ and ‘interrupted’ leisure. Men enjoy more pure
leisure time. Women’s leisure, by contrast, tends to be synchronized with child-
care and is thus punctuated by activities of unpaid work. In addition to imply-
ing that women’s leisure time may be less restorative than men’s, Bittman and
Wajcman show how the synchronization of activities in any given time slot pro-
duces qualitatively different experiences of time.
The dimension of synchronization can also be found in studies of post-
Fordist workplaces. Garhammer (1995) and Breedveld (1998) describe the pro-
cess of ‘flexibilization’ whereby working times and locations are increasingly
deregulated and scattered. The consequence is a temporal shift from ‘9 to 5,
Monday to Friday’ to the ‘24-hour society’. For Breedveld, those in professional
occupations have greater control over the sequence of work activities and can
therefore develop strategies whereby the type of work they conduct outside the
‘9 to 5’ model can be synchronized with leisure activities (such as completing
Periodicity
Periodicity refers to the frequency and repetition of events and activities. For
example, eating is a practice conducted with a high degree of frequency,
although as Wouters’ (1986) account of informalization suggests, the extent to
which the practice is repeated within the same temporal frames of each day may
be weakening with the emergence of grazing eating patterns. Periodicity is also
implicit in accounts of the effects that labour-saving domestic appliances have
on domestic organization. Vanek (1978) demonstrated that the amount of time
devoted to domestic work by women in the USA remained constant between the
1920s and 1970s despite the diffusion of domestic labour-saving technologies.
She explains this consistency by suggesting that such technologies increase the
periodicity (frequency) at which domestic tasks are conducted.
Summary
The above accounts provide valuable insights into the relationship between
substantive spheres of social life (consumption, leisure, work, technology or
domestic labour) and the changing organization and distribution of time. In
doing so, each account focuses on selected dimensions of time, but few explore
the relationships between different dimensions of time or attempt to account for
the temporal rhythms of daily life beyond the remit of their substantive focus.
The Study
This article draws from research concerned with how various forms of conve-
nience technologies and services respond to, and produce, changing forms of
temporal organization. The primary source of data was interviews conducted
with 20 households (a total of 27 respondents) located in a suburb of Bristol,
England. The sample comprised single households, couples with and without
children, and the ages of respondents varied between 25 and 65. Some were
dual income households, some professionals and some retired, thus providing a
range of demographic and socio-economic status groups. Respondents were
contacted via letter sent to every other house in the most and least expensive
streets of the town. Interviews lasted, on average, two hours. Adopting a con-
versational approach (Douglas, 1985) toward semi-structured interviews,
respondents were asked whether they felt society, in general, was more time
pressured than in the past, whether they felt pressed for time, to recount and
reflect on the previous week and weekend day, and to describe how they
organized the passage of time in their daily lives.
Tempo
Rushed Leisurely
Gym; shopping Bike ride Watch television;
eat out; walk to
the park; read
Synchronization
By arrangement
Gym; eat out Watch television; Walk to the
shopping park; bike ride;
read
Duration
Day
Eat out; Gym; walk Watch television;
shopping to the park bike ride;
read
Sequence
Fixed Inter-related allocation Contingent
Eat out; Shopping; watch Walk to the
gym television; read park; bike ride
the evening that another non-work activity took place. Bradley, an accountant,
took his daughter for a short bike ride to ‘get her out the house’ while Cindy
finished preparation of their evening meal. They then watched television
together. When Cindy went to sleep, Bradley read for ‘half an hour’, something
he did in order to ‘switch off’ before sleeping.
The weekend day presented many more opportunities for non-work acti-
vities. As on every Saturday morning, Bradley entertained his daughter, in this
case with a ‘leisurely’ trip to the park. During this time, Cindy ‘dashed’ to the
shops (tempo), as she wanted to buy something for their evening out, clothes
shopping being a frequent but not regular activity for Cindy (periodicity). The
afternoon consisted of domestic work while their daughter visited her grand-
parents. They described the need to complete housework in the afternoon so
that they could ‘properly relax’ (Cindy) when dining out with friends in the
evening. This was a pre-arranged event (synchronization), ‘the only weekend
that we could all meet up’, and was an infrequent activity; they rarely ate out
with friends. To compound the difficulties, they could only book a table for
‘7.30 when really 8.30 would have been better so we can get Lucy settled pro-
perly’ (Cindy), although Bradley observed a relative upside to this arrangement
because ‘it does mean we’re not in such a rush to get back for the baby-sitter
as we leave that bit earlier’ (Bradley). The meal lasted all evening. As can be
seen, respondents’ description of their days contained enough detail to clearly
interpret the location of each practice within the five dimensions of time.
Periodicity
Figure 2 shows most practices were conducted with regularity and frequency.
Practices conducted with non-household members were least likely to be regu-
lar events, even if they were frequent. For example, Mike and Charlotte ate out
with friends frequently – ‘about once a month or so’ (Mike) – but this was not
regular in the sense of being conducted on the same day every month. Practices
conducted with household members tended to have a high degree of regularity,
being activities that couples and families conducted as a matter of routine.
Frequent but
Irregular not regular Regular Total
With others 10 10 16 36
With household member 4 6 21 31
Alone 7 15 24 46
Total practices 21 31 61 113
Eating a take-away meal on a Saturday night and taking children to the park
were characterized by their habitual location within a specific weekly or daily
time slot. Yet, some activities were ‘one offs’ (Sarah), such as a family visit to a
tourist attraction or playing a board game as a means of ‘killing an hour’
(Mark). Practices conducted alone tended to be frequent and have a high degree
of regularity, especially if the respondent had particular commitment to the
practice or it regularly ‘filled’ empty time slots.
Tempo
Tempo is a difficult dimension to analyse because one person’s interpretation of
rush may be another’s experience of leisure. It is also a contingent condition,
dependent on the degree to which interrelated practices infringe on the pursuit
of that practice. Consider this description of a family outing:
We went swimming and took a picnic so we had that, and then went on an adven-
ture trail at Bowood. And because we had to get there by twelve to make it worth
while we had to leave swimming with enough time to spare. Then we had to find
somewhere for the picnic and it just went on like that. God I needed a day off after
that day off!
In this case, swimming had taken longer than Sarah anticipated because the
‘pool was much busier than usual’, ruining her carefully prepared schedule and
making the tempo of the ‘main activity’ feel rushed. Examples such as this show
that tempo was often related to the disruption of temporal schedules.
By Loose No
arrangement arrangement arrangement Total
With others 26 8 2 36
With household member 7 14 10 31
Alone 1 3 42 46
Total practices 34 25 54 113
Other practices described as being loosely arranged were those conducted regu-
larly, removing the need to make arrangements but requiring the institutional-
ization of the practice in the schedules of others. Kathryn described the
regularity of visiting extended family as reducing any need to make arrange-
ments because: ‘it’s just an unwritten rule, eleven o’clock every Sunday’.
High degrees of arrangement were also required for practices that took
place with household members and which were not regular or frequent. By con-
trast, practices conducted alone typically required no prior arrangements,
except in Audrey’s case where she operated a rota with her daughter to share
access to the computer. The degree to which a practice involved others and the
extent to which the practice represented a regular or routine engagement com-
bined to determine the extent to which a practice required synchronization with
the personal schedules of others.
Duration
Duration was also closely related to whether a practice involved the co-
participation of others. Practices subject to arrangement with non-household
members tended to have a relatively long duration, which was appropriate
given that such practices required a fixed position within personal schedules. By
contrast, practices conducted alone tended to have a short duration, partly
because they were often practices conducted in order to ‘fill’ time between fixed
practices. Engagement in practices with household members tended to be of a
relatively long duration if it was a planned event.
Sequence
The sequencing of practices was critical to their positioning in the other four
dimensions. Practices conducted with non-household members were over-
whelmingly fixed, largely because they required arrangement and coordination
(Figure 4). Other practices were sequenced in relation to those fixed within a
particular time slot. Mike and Charlotte described how:
Mike: Everything’s geared towards eight o’clock, that’s the time we were meeting
John and Sue
Fixed Located in
Fixed set of practices Contingent Total
With others 26 7 3 36
With household member 10 17 4 31
Alone 5 12 29 46
Total practices 41 36 36 113
Charlotte: Yeah, you sort of count back from that don’t you, like an hour to get
ready, so that’s seven
Mike: I was done by half seven so I got to check out the footie results on teletext
while waiting
For Charlotte and Mike, going out with friends was fixed and getting ready to
go out was interrelated because it needed to precede the fixed event. For Mike,
however, a temporal gap emerged between getting ready and going out. This is
indicative of how the allocation of practices conducted alone was overwhelm-
ingly contingent on the emergence of temporal gaps within the sequence of
practices. Fiona recounted how: ‘I got back from Mum’s and, well, the traffic
had been good so I was back at six and not going out ‘til eight so I had a quick
browse of the internet to kill time really’. Even practices conducted alone and
with a high degree of regularity had a contingent location in the sequence of
practices. James captured why this was the case: ‘I always watch Emmerdale,
without fail, but that’s just because I ain’t got anything else on when it’s on, you
know I’ve had my tea by seven and if I’m doing anything it’s always at around
eight’. Practices conducted alone might take place at the same time every day
or week but this was because those time slots were routinely caught between
fixed practices.
Gender
Consistent with previous studies, the domestic division of labour and mother-
hood was at the heart of gendered temporal experiences. Women who had
dependent children held primary responsibility for the organization of child-
care, schooling, servicing friendships and attendance at clubs and other activi-
ties. The distinction between mothers in paid employment, who are often
described as suffering the dual burden of domestic and paid work, and
home-workers was, however, less striking. Deborah, a mother of two and
a home-worker, stated that:
Lots of things are planned for me if you like, like all the things the kids do, you
know, everything fits around them ... once Chloe is at nursery I get some time to
myself but then it’s like I haven’t got enough time to do anything … I can read a
magazine which is nice and get some jobs done but I can’t go shopping ’cause there
isn’t the time.
or anything. It’s about grabbing the opportunities but even when you do you know
you have to grab it quickly because there will be something you have to do after.
Charlotte and Deborah typified how mothers’ daily practices were oriented
around a range of fixed points which strongly influenced the sequence, tempo
and duration of non-work practices.
This point is reinforced when contrasted with men. Fathers described a
whole host of constraints related to children. However, their narratives placed
less emphasis on responsibility for the organization of children’s daily sche-
dules. Take for example Mark, a father of two children and married to Amanda
who also worked full time. They discussed an occasion where, on the day that
he usually finishes work early and collects the children from school, both the
children went to play at friends’ homes:
Mark: Mand said she’d pick them up on the way home from work so I thought
‘great’ and met up with a couple of friends … and went for a few pints
Amanda: Yeah and I got in and had to dash around, bath the kids and that because
you never got back ‘till gone six when you said you’d get back and get every-
thing ready for when I got in with the kids. If that was me, I would’ve got back
so the kids didn’t have to hang ’round waiting for a bath and then be late
for bed.
This is not to argue that fathers do not participate with childcare – Amanda
quickly qualified that ‘Mark is very hands on when it comes to the kids’. Rather,
it suggests that the personal schedules and temporal organization of children’s
lives had a stronger bearing on the temporal rhythms of mothers’ daily lives.
It was also interesting to note that women with adult children also
described how the presence of those children impacted on their daily rhythms.
Anne explained how:
They usually come over on a Sunday for lunch and that so my entire Sunday is taken
up by that really. Obviously I get to read the papers in the morning and watch the
tele on the night but a great chunk is cooking, getting things ready and waiting for
them all to arrive.
Ron’s response captured the point: ‘It’s just like the old days, only I get to
sit here, read the papers and watch the box instead of having to entertain the
kiddos or mend their bikes’.
Gendered constraints related to senses and degrees of obligation to children
and family. Fathers did not describe the same degree of primary obligation as
did mothers. Fathers, especially those with non-dependent children, did not
describe activities centred around children as being key coordinating or fixed
points in the daily schedule to the same extent as did mothers.
that were variously described as family or quality time. This involved playing
with children, taking them places and spending time together as a family. As
discussed elsewhere, such moments of family togetherness (Daly, 1996)
required a significant degree of coordination between the personal schedules of
each household member and synchronization with other practices (Southerton,
2003). Sarah’s account of the planning required for a day out at an adventure
park, discussed in the previous section, served as a good example.
Interestingly, respondents with teenage children, all of whom were aged
between 41 and 50, described conducting more non-work practices in the two
days recounted than did any of the other respondents. This was because the
relative independence of teenage children presented these respondents with
opportunities to engage in personal practices while continuing to participate in
a range of family activities. Audrey explained:
Now that she’s older she does lots of things on her own which is nice because it gives
me time to do my things like go out shopping and that, but we also, well she’s
not that grown up that we don’t have meals together and that, play games, go to the
cinema, that sort of thing.
also had a good sense of where he would be and what he was doing.
Coordinating practices with Ron was relatively unproblematic. The familiarity
of customary practices favoured by many, although not all, respondents with
lower educational qualifications meant that practices were often submerged in
temporal routines. This had the effect of reducing anxiety about fitting practices
into time, about coordinating with networks and about moving between cul-
tural contexts. Respondents with high and low educational qualifications might
have shared similar rhythms of the day, but those rhythms were experienced dif-
ferently because of different modes of engaging in practices.
Routine vs Spontaneity
The final cultural orientation that influenced the allocation of practices related
to the valuing of routine or spontaneity. Many highly educated respondents
deliberately attempted to create temporal spaces in which the potential for
spontaneity was increased. This involved tactics like juggling many tasks to
leave a Sunday afternoon empty of practices in the hope that one’s partner
might: ‘surprise me, you know, take me shopping or to the cinema’ (Louise).
Amanda described how ‘I don’t like things to become too routine, it’s nice when
things happen unexpectedly, like a friend phoning and saying “let’s go out for
a drink tonight”, it’s those sort of occasions that always seem most fun’.
Lower-educated respondents were generally inclined to maintain routines
and firm boundaries between practices. For example, Mary insisted on a clear
boundary between domestic work and her evening of non-work practices. To
achieve this she went to great lengths to eat at the same time each day, and
frowned upon unexpected interruptions to her ‘potter time’: ‘to my mind when
you get home is when you come home, it’s our time and I take a very dim view
of it being interrupted … it just means our evening is messed-up’. Mary was one
of seven respondents with lower education who explicitly expressed a personal
need for preserving routines and viewed spontaneity as disruption.
Conclusion
The day is the context for the allocation of composite practices. The temporal
organization of the day can be characterized as being constituted by practices
that have a fixed position within schedules. These are surrounded by interre-
lated practices that have a more malleable position within sequences, leaving a
stock of practices contingent on filling empty slots within the day. Practices that
tended to be fixed were those that involved the co-participation of others where
a degree of coordination was necessary; a high degree of obligation to others;
and, significant degrees of personal commitment. Temporally fixed practices
also tended to have a relatively long duration within the context of a day.
While the temporal organization of the day followed the same component
form for all respondents, how practices were allocated and the experience of
those practices differed according to a range of social constraints. Parents
explained how children’s activities took priority, acting as fixed points which
limited the range of practices in which they could engage. Mothers found them-
selves primarily responsible for the organization of children’s schedules and this
had a significant impact on the sequence, tempo and duration of their non-work
practices. Gender, age and life-course therefore represent constraints that
shaped differential temporal experiences.
Level of education, which, by definition, is closely related to social class,
was influential with respect to the range of practices and modes of engagement
in them. Those with high educational qualifications expressed a preference for
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Alan Warde, Elizabeth Shove and Mark Harvey for their intel-
lectual support during the research upon which this article is based. I am also grate-
ful to Rosemary Deem and colleagues at the ESRC Centre for Research on
Innovation and Competition and the European Sociological Association
Consumption Network, and two anonymous referees for comments on earlier drafts
of this article.
References
Dale Southerton
Is a research fellow at the ESRC Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition,
University of Manchester. His research interests centre around the sociology of con-
sumption, with particular focus on time and space, domestic technologies, identity-
formation, sustainability and innovation. He is currently working on two ESRC research
projects: ‘the Diffusion of Cultures of Consumption: A Comparative Analysis’; and
‘Sustainable Domestic Technologies: Changing Practice, Technology and Convention’.
Recent publications include articles in the journals Time and Society and Sociological
Review and an edited book, Sustainable Consumption (Edward Elgar, 2004).
Address: CRIC, University of Manchester, Harold Hankins Building, Booth Street West,
Manchester, M13 9QH, UK.
E-mail: dale.southerton@manchester.ac.uk