Data analysis was informed by a Theory of Practice (see Southerton 2006 for a discussion of the application of a practice-based approach to the analysis of temporalities). The central principle is to examine the socio-economic, cultural and material configuration of the practices through which daily life is comprised. This requires taking practices rather than the ‘individual’ as the core unit of analysis. Critical to this approach is how practices of daily life relate to one another – how particular socio-economic, material and cultural constraints (and affordances) configure the performance of any given practice. By focusing attention on practices, analysis centres upon the ordering of daily life; on the way that the mundane and the extra-ordinary connect, are reconfigured and rendered meaningful. A practice-based approach represents a ‘meso-level’ analysis because it interrogates and reveals the ways that ‘macro’ processes (such as technological innovation, economic restructuring, changing cultural values) impact on the ‘micro’ detail (the performance and experience of practices) of everyday lives.
Changing Temporal Rhythms: 1937 and 2000
All respondents from the interviews conducted in 2000 were quick to suggest that contemporary society is characterized by an increasing shortage of time, and were particularly fluent in identifying generic time pressures that neatly mapped onto dominant discourses (pressures that result from consumption, workplace competition, family life and a fear of wasting time). However, when it came to discussing their own lives, senses of being harried were met with a degree of ambivalence. To not be harried was in some way regarded as not leading a full life. To be too harried was often seen as an admission that respondents didn’t make enough time to spend with the people most important to them.
In negotiating this ambivalence, respondents described their daily lives as a roller-coaster ride with moments of harriedness and calm, of ‘hot’ and ‘cold spots of temporal activity. Hot and cold spots were differentiated according to the density and intensity of practices performed within designated time frames: hot spots having a high density and intensity of practices. The challenge as described by respondents was to coordinate within their networks so that cold spots, which were variously described as ‘quality time’ and ‘family time’, were aligned. They were mechanisms used by all respondents to manage the rhythms of their daily life. In a context where few institutionally timed events (e.g. work and meal times) fixed the temporal and spatial location of practices (with the important exception of school times), respondents re-instituted their own fixed events. These occurred around practices of co-participation, such as eating together, socializing by prior arrangement, participating in a team sport. Practices of consumption and work were presented as flexible in their temporal scheduling, but many of those practices came with sets of constraints and requirements (such as the co-participation of others) and this rendered coordination a contemporary challenge to the personal scheduling of work, domestic, consumption and inter-personal practices within daily life. Coordinating and scheduling practices were challenges that generated harriedness through the hot spots that were necessary if cold spots, which have come to symbolize togetherness, were to be achieved (Southerton 2003; Southerton and Tomlinson 2005).
Re-ordering Temporal Rhythms
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