Practice-Time Profiles
I use the term ‘practice-time profiles’ to refer to embedded conventions of duration, sequence and timing associated with the competent performance of a practice. As this hybrid phrase suggests, the details of everyday scheduling reflect and reproduce practice-based obligations and notions of propriety. These take various forms. Conventions of timing are important for doing and for interpreting a range of ordinary practices. In Zerubavel’s words: ‘[W]e have relatively fixed notions of what constitutes “the proper time”. It is almost inconceivable, for example, that an event such as a dance would be scheduled for the morning (even on non-working days)’ (1981: 8). Likewise, phoning at 3 a.m. is itself a signal of some kind of emergency. ‘During off-call times for the telephone (say before nine in the morning and after ten at night for adult members of the middle class) a phone ringing may cause alarm (Goffman 1971: 300–301, cited in Zerubavel 1981: 23). While these arrangements are matters of social convention – in some sub-cultures it is perfectly normal to go dancing at dawn or to phone at night – other forms of scheduling intersect with natural rhythms of seasonality and decay: hence patterns of digging and harvesting garden crops and of painting woodwork before the rot sets in.
There are further senses in which timing is critical. The effective movement and coordination of the body is clearly vital for practices as varied as those of fixing of car engines, windsurfing or playing tennis. Dant and Bowles’ (2002) study of the intricately sequenced work of car repair gives a sense the embodied and materialized ordering of process. They write as follows:
The technician has within their body an understanding of how a task should proceed and rarely needs to consult other colleagues or manuals. Their approach to the task seems to have the structure of a sequence of actions that need to be completed: removal of road wheel, removal of brake disc etc. to get access to the constant velocity (CV) joint, removal of damaged CV boot, removal of contaminated grease, replacement with appropriate grease, replacement of boot, refitting of brake disc, road wheel etc. This sequenced pattern of action is largely determined by the designed-in properties of the objects involved. (Dant and Bowles 2002: 13)
In this instance, sequence is so much part of doing that a single error will spoil the entire performance. In other, more forgiving situations, taking too long, finishing too quickly or doing things in the wrong order signals incompetence but does not result in total failure. By way of illustration, the Mass Observation Study’s report into the culture and organization of drinking in a UK town comments in detail on the phenomenon of ‘drinking level’ (Mass Observation 1987). Partly but not entirely due to the convention of buying rounds (each member of a party takes turns to buy drinks for everyone else), the rate at which an individual drinks is ‘controlled’ by a usually unstated but nonetheless effective convention of mutual synchronization. If anyone drinks ‘too fast’ or ‘too slow’, the balance of the whole is thrown out of kilter.
Everyday Practice
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