Punctuality and Progress
The need for people to coordinate their activities has been important throughout history, but never more so than today. We take for granted that our lives are shaped by the hours of the day, as measured by the clock. From childhood, we are taught the worth of punctuality, the imperative to be on time and not to squander it. The valorization of speed was central for the development of the industrial way of life. As Jeremy Rifkin remarks, “Eficiency and speed characterize the time values of the modern age. . . . The idea of saving and compressing time has been stamped into the psyche of Western civilization and now much of the world.”2
Yet, what has come to seem natural and normal is the outcome of centuries of technical innovation and the circulation of ideas about time. Chronologies of standard technological history give the clock pride of place. And it is through the lens of Thompson’s essay, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” that social scientists primarily view modern time in economic terms, as market time.
According to Thompson, prior to industrialization, people depended on “natural rhythms” oriented to a variety of tasks related to an agricultural economy, task-oriented time. These older notations were replaced by a new manufacturers’ time, a commodity measured in monetary terms and regarded as precious. He saw this as the result both of advances in timekeeping and of a Puritan ethic which helped people internalize the idea that time was not to be wasted. By the nineteenth century, according to Thompson, the idea of time thrift had become culturally embedded. Traditional rhythms began to look indolent and even primitive. The division and synchronization of labor became the norm in many manufacturing sites and, over the course of a century, manufacturers’ time came to seem natural.
Time and Motion
39