Theories of consumer culture and post-industrial society place particular emphasis on the shift from a society ordered through production and work to a consumption and leisure society. In the process, a wider variety and greater flexibility of temporal rhythms in everyday life can be identified. The temporal rhythms of the contemporary period are characterized by the growing necessity for personal coordination of practices. Collective rhythms and routines of daily life remain, only they are not ‘institutionally ordered’ in the same way as they were in 1937. Indeed, the de-institutionalization of many times (work times, shopping times, meal times, laundry times) creates multiple and overlapping routines. Routines and rhythms are made and remade everyday, in micro and detailed ways. Those institutions which no longer dictate rhythms with such force still, however, act as constraints. Normative expectations of the timings of cultural practices, and the preservation of particular times for valued cultural practices of togetherness (Sundays, week-ends, evenings), continue to provide a basic structure pinned loosely around attempts to re-institute or re-routinize temporal rhythms. The respondents from the year 2000 were distinctive (when compared with the diarists of 1937) in the variety of strategies that they employed in order to re-sequence, juggle and coordinate practices across time and space. These strategies were largely dependent on material goods and infrastructures that make the progressive erosion of institutionally timed rhythms possible. By contrast, the materialities of daily life in 1937 acted to constrain and locate practices in time rather than afford their flexible and diverse allocation within personal schedules. To understand fully the re-ordering of temporal rhythms it is therefore necessary to examine how the temporalities of social practices change; and to do this requires analysis of the shifting relationships between the spatialities, materialities and network configurations (or co-presence) of practices, the interconnections between practices, and the ways in which practices are coordinated.
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• Dale Southerton