And so one could continue. The point is not to document all possible temporal dimensions of doing but rather to notice that they exist, that such characteristics are integral rather than coincidental features, and that these time-related qualities are themselves subject to change. Before turning to related but more complicated questions of coordination, I want to say a bit more about how practice-time profiles evolve and intersect.
How is it that arrangements previously defined as inappropriate short-cuts (e.g. the working lunch; regular use of ready-meals or reliance on instant coffee), or as exceptional rather than usual arrangements (e.g. taking a day trip from London to Brussels), have become the norm, at least for some? In reflecting on these questions, commentators write in rather general terms about the speeding up of society and the increasingly widespread experience of being hurried and harried (Southerton et al. 2001). In keeping with the view that time is part of practice, it makes sense to focus not on the pace of life or the shrinking of distance as such but on new combinations and configurations of doing – commuting, multi-tasking, day tripping – which take root around infrastructural affordances like those associated with mobile technologies or with faster means and modes of travel.
In addition, and as already mentioned, it is important to notice that the practicetime profiles of specific activities are shaped and influenced by each other and by deliberate efforts to structure routines and habits. For example, the very notion of ‘prime-time TV’ is itself an outcome of conscious programming (by producers) and of a co-evolving convention of settling down in front of the screen (by consumers) at a certain time of day.<sup>4</sup> As these comments indicate, interpretations of possible, potential and proper time and timing are critical for the ongoing reproduction (and transformation) of specific practices and for sometime supportive, sometimes uneasy relations between them.
Such considerations are also relevant for understandings of what it is to do and to be a practitioner, and hence for the recruitment and defection of specific populations of practice carriers. The idea that certain pursuits are appropriate to people of different age, gender or social class contributes to the persistence of a temporal ordering of propriety variously policed by laws (under-age drinking; sex) and social pressures of one kind or another (e.g. disapproval of ‘mutton dressed as lamb’; norms of starting and stopping smoking, etc.).
As Philip Ariès’s social history of childhood makes clear, such conventions are culturally and historically specific. In 1600, people beyond the age of three or four ‘played the same games as the adult, either with other children or with adults’ (Ariès 1962: 71). Over subsequent centuries, adults, especially of the upper classes, abandoned or transformed these games and in the process introduced and reproduced age-related distinctions and differences which had not existed before. According to Ariès, the cumulative result – not only of games playing, but also of other institutionalized ways of doing – is a society organised around increasingly precisely calibrated repertoires of distinct ‘ways of life’.<sup>5</sup> Recognizable phases of life are distinguished one from another through the specification and enactment of appropriately ‘childish’ practices. The sociotemporal invention of childhood is consequently important in structuring the days and doings not only of young people, but of adults too. In so far as the same applies to other categories like those of class and gender, the terrain of practice-time is criss-crossed (and made) by the daily working out of all manner of distinctions (Bourdieu 1984).
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Elizabeth Shove