These facts about materiality and spatiality, by the way, suggest that the designers and producers who make and lay out material arrangements have a special hand in configuring practices and their relations. These individuals enjoy the privilege of initiative – in constructing and laying out settings, they confront other people with faits accompli to which these others must accommodate themselves. Of course, the power of designers and producers in this regard is limited. How they build and arrange the world reflects existing practices and social matters. People, moreover, appropriate material arrangements in accord with the practices they already carry on. Still, the material spatialities that designers and producers set up form a background for the bundling of practices.
Bundled practices also possess significant objective temporal features. I will say nothing about these. My present aim is simply to suggest that interwoven timespaces form an important glue through which social affairs exist. Interwoven timespaces are not the only glue. For instance, the rules and general understandings through which practices bundle might have nothing to do with temporality or spatiality. I have said nothing, moreover, about the connections – including the technological connections – among material arrangements that are crucial for the existence of social phenomena.
Conclusion
This chapter has sought to make plausible that activity timespace is central to the organization of social life. In particular, I claimed, interwoven activity timespaces are essential to the coordination of action and key to the bundling of practices that helps constitute social organizations, events and phenomena. Theorists have often distinguished kinds of social linkage that work through the harmonization of actors orientations from kinds of linkage that work, so to speak, behind their backs, for example through unintentional consequences of action. What these theorists dub ‘actors’ orientations’ are inherently tied to what I am calling ‘activity timespace’. Interwoven timespaces are crucial, however, not only to the social linkages that work through the harmonization of orientations, but also to those that work behind people’s backs. The type of coordination that marks, say, an economic system rests significantly on common, shared and orchestrated timespaces. There is always more to the story than timespace, but timespace is an essential mediator of social existence.
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• Ted Schatzki