Everyday Practice and the Production and Consumption of Time Elizabeth Shove
Everybody’s in so much of a rush nowadays, now everybody’s trying to make money, trying to get to places, they’ve got to get here, they’ve got to get there, they’ve got to do their shopping – this, that and the other, I think there’s a lot more pressure, you haven’t got the time to do as much as what you want in a day nowadays.
Hedges 2001, part 4: 14
a sense of social time is made and re-made according to social practices.
May and Thrift 2001: 5
Introduction
In this chapter the simple observation that things like sleeping, eating, working and playing all take time provides the starting point for a progressively more complicated discussion of how the micro and macro temporalities of daily life might be represented and conceptualized. In what follows I consider two broad approaches. The first relatively familiar view is that time is a scarce resource which practices consume. The second is that ‘it is the rhythm of social life which is at the basis of the category of time’ (Durkheim 1976: 440). In other words, temporal arrangements arise from the effective reproduction of everyday life, or, to put it more strongly, practices make time.
I suggest that these two orientations, one emphasizing the consumption, the other the production of time, justify and are sustained by different lines of inquiry and methods of research. In reviewing these approaches my aim is to identify promising but as yet under-developed ways of analysing the interweaving of personal and collective logistics. Rather than studying the temporal ‘properties’ of a single practice, or the life and times of a single practitioner, my aim is to explore the temporal implications of contemporary complexes of social practice. In the process, new questions arise: for example, what does the appropriate or competent reproduction of everyday practice (i.e. the sets of practices that make up everyday life) demand in terms of minutes, timing, sequence, coordination and career? How do temporal profiles of this kind emerge? How do they fit together and with what consequence now and for the future? In the last part of the chapter I speculate about how the practice-time characteristics of society might be described and represented. While there are points of connection between Lefebvre’s work on ‘rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre 2004: 73–74) and the project of capturing the temporal qualities of always-changing, always-intersecting practices, this chapter plays down readymade distinctions between natural/cyclical and social/linear time and concentrates instead on patterns of temporality as they emerge from the dynamic coordination of complex systems of practice.
17