Social advancement is equated with social mobility, even though, strictly speaking, social decline is an equally probable form of mobility. International competition flourishes against a background of mobility, an immensely accelerated circulation of everything that is mobile or can be made mobile. Innovations and their dissemination promote mobility in the area of cultural production; it is not enough to innovate, since innovations have to be disseminated and this presupposes mobility. As always, when norms and social values are involved, an ideological distortion to maintain existing imbalances in power or to disguise the latter is never far away. In striking contrast to the expectations of mobility, for instance, which are entertained of the average employee, there are the key areas of political and economic power, which show astonishingly little mobility. Where, as in banking for instance, trust and familiarity with practices and discretion are presupposed, mobility is desired only in one's own closed sphere.
Another dominant temporal norm which was built into production technologies through its relation to economics and nevertheless became a generalized norm, indeed a social status symbol, is the shortage of time. This results from the economic value it was given with capitalist accumulation and industrialization. Time was discovered as a factor of productivity, and the economy is fundamentally shaped to this day by questions of the economy of time. Shortage of time became a central value in industrialized societies – far beyond the area of production in all areas of life. Making more of the time which is available and in short supply is the supreme principle for technological artefacts as well as for human activities. Rationalization measures, the invention of the conveyor belt, the notorious time and motion studies and other Taylorist prescriptions for identifying wastes of energy and then eliminating them, are only the most famous examples of the allembracing temporal norm of shortage, which people and machines have to face and which is internalized in both - in people by the rules which became a matter of course for them and which manifest themselves in their being 'pressed for time', and in machines which can ‘survive' economically only when they are able to come to terms with the shortage of time.
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Cronos's Fear of the New Age