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# Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture

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1. Keeneland as economic enterprise: the interlocking of management, grounds keeping, betting, concession, public relations, sales and other Keeneland corporate practices in the interconnected material arrangements (offices, track, runways, betting corner, concession stands,etc.) where they occur.

2. Keeneland race day as an event: performances of actions belonging to the intertwined practices of race watching, betting, conviviality, people watching, entertainment, race track management, supervision, race preparation and horse grooming at interconnected stands, betting corners, boxes, walkways, TV rooms, offices, corners, barns, paddocks, and so on.

3. Goings-on in the boxes owned by wealthy horse farm owners as a social phenomenon: the joining of the practices of entertainment, flirtation, deal-making, horse observation and alcohol consumption in these boxes and in the aisles that connect them.

These three bundles overlap. This overlap reflects the fact that the corporation, the race day and the goings-on in the boxes are not substantially distinct matters in the world.

Practices bundle and thereby help constitute social phenomena through various sinews. Some of these sinews are the same as those through which timespaces interweave. Practices overlap, for instance, through common organizational elements (common ends, projects, rules, general understandings), some of which circumscribe timespaces. In the corporation, for instance, the end of making sufficient profit organizes management, public relations and sales practices in common. Much of what goes on in the luxury boxes, meanwhile, is keyed to events on the track (common pasts). Common or shared pasts exist, in fact, whenever people act on the same beliefs, expectations, perceptions or hopes. Practices can also bundle through the orchestration of timespace. The different ends and projects for which the people in the boxes act are often interconnected, as are those pursued by the people carrying on the practices that constitute the corporation. Orchestrated pasts occur when people interrelatedly react to, or in the light of, different states of affairs, for example when the hope of betters that they will win and the belief of track managers that visitors will continue to bet are not independent conditions.

Practices overlap not just through same and orchestrated temporalities (through same and orchestrated organizational elements generally), but also by virtue of doings and sayings belonging to more than one practice. Some of the actions that help make up race preparation also help compose entertainment (e.g. walking the horse in the interior paddock), just as some of the actions that help compose the observation of horses are also part of betting (e.g. watching films of past races). In these cases, practices bundle through the present dimension of activity. Practices are also linked via the present dimension whenever they are linked to one another via chains of action that embrace actions from multiple practices. As for spatiality, practices bundle when the arrays of places and paths at which their constituent actions are performed overlap, are orchestrated or refer to one another (an example of the latter is the customer affairs office being understood in betting practices as a place to demand that management alter its policies). Indeed, in so far as the practices of the Keeneland corporation, the race day and the luxury box goings-on are carried on amid the same material arrangements (the grandstands, the concessions area, the interior paddock, the boxes, etc.), the actions that compose them are performed amid the same arrays of places and paths. This common and shared spatiality strongly contributes to the bundling of practices that makes up each of these social phenomena; it also forms a background for the operation of other avenues through which the practices involved bundle.

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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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Consider, for example, the following fact reported in Dale Southerton’s contribution to this volume (see also Elizabeth Shove’s chapter): that coordinated actions today rest more on interpersonal arrangement and scheduling and less on institutionally prescribed times and spaces than they did seventy years ago. The action coordination that arises from communication and accommodation among family members or coworkers clearly rests on interwoven timespaces. The same, however, is true of the institutionally effected coordination that used to be more prevalent. For instance, in so far as the fixed workplace starting and finishing times that Southerton discusses coordinate action, they do so by instigating common, shared and orchestrated temporalities and spatialities for both workers and the people closely related to them (e.g. family members). The coordination of action that derives from institutional events works through interwoven timespaces.

A different sort of example is the chain of actions, through which a few clicks of my computer mouse eventuates in the delivery of a package at my front door. No accommodation, communication or scheduling occurs between me and the other people whose actions, combined, lead to the package sitting on my front stoop; the action coordination in this example does not result from a harmonization of the orientations of the actors involved. Each pair of actions in the chain evinces, however, a configuration of interwoven timespaces. These configurations might or might not be enjoined or instigated by institutionally prescribed phenomena such as workplace starting and finishing times. Without these configurations, however, the links, and thus the chain, would not exist. Linkages among people’s actions that do not work through the harmonization of orientations still rest on interwoven timespaces.

Notes

1. Conceptions of succession as a subjective and not an objective phenomenon also exist, but I will ignore these in the following.

2. All examples in this chapter are taken from Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, Kentucky, where the author has occasionally spent an afternoon consuming.

3. The structure of temporality resembles the temporal structure of motivation, as Schutz (e.g. 1962) conceived of it. Schutz, however, understood this structure as a configuration of objective time.

4. I acknowledge that the significance of the world for human beings need not be teleological. Examples are religious, symbolic and aesthetic significance. By themselves, however, significances of these sorts do not specify spatialities, that

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is, place-path layouts. They instead, I believe, shape such layouts by determining and otherwise combining with the teleological orientation of human activity.

5. Cf. Elizabeth Shove’s discussion of the reconfiguration of practice-time profiles in her contribution to this volume.

References

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• Ted Schatzki

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Re-ordering Temporal Rhythms Coordinating Daily Practices in the UK in 1937 and 2000 Dale Southerton

Introduction: The Paradox of Time Pressure

Time pressure is a contemporary malady for which a range of prescriptions have been spawned to alleviate the problem, including: self-help time management advice; convenience technologies and services; voluntary simplicity; and work–life balance policies. The underlying causes are identified in macro social processes that are deemed to re-order the temporalities of daily life. These include processes of consumer culture, the restructuring of labour markets, technological innovations and the cultural conditions of reflexive modernization. And the implications of time pressure are profound – well-being is compromised by the stress of being harried, social capital (or community) declines as people no longer have the time to participate in collective or public activities, families and friendships are torn asunder as we have no time to spend with those we care most about. Time pressure is, not surprisingly, a substantive concern that feeds into several influential theories of social change.

Many theoretical accounts attempt to explain the paradox that increasingly people feel time pressured despite time diary data consistently revealing that people have longer durations of free time today than did previous generations (Robinson and Godbey 1997). In the interest of brevity, five sets of theoretical accounts of the causes of time pressure will be outlined. The first can be described as ‘economic restructuring’ with particular reference to the impact of dual-earner families. These accounts highlight that women experience a ‘dual burden’ once they enter paid employment: the burden of ‘juggling’ domestic and workplace responsibilities (Sullivan 1997). One of the ways in which dual-earner households deal with ‘juggling is through reliance on domestic technologies which reduce the amount of time devoted to unpaid work – although the extent to which labour-saving technologies actually save time is debatable (Schwartz-Cowan 1983). This relates to a second set of accounts which suggest the further rationalization of time. Hochschild (1997) argues that as hours of paid work increase within households (what she calls the first shift), time for domestic matters (the second shift) is squeezed, and time devoted to emotional and inter-personal relationships becomes experienced as a ‘third shift subject to rationing and social planning. This is a process of rationalization because the principles of Taylorization, whereby tasks are broken down into their component parts (fragmented) and re-sequenced to maximize temporal efficiency, have become applied to domestic and inter-personal activities. For Hochschild, increasingly more spheres of daily life are regulated by the principles of efficient sequencing of tasks within designated slots of time, and it is this that generates experiences of time pressure.

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The third, and most prominent, account of time pressure is Schor’s (1992, 1998) ‘work–spend’ cycles. Schor explains the economic benefits for firms of training a limited number of employees who work long hours as opposed to a large number of employees who work limited hours. She also highlights the significance of consumer culture in ‘ratcheting’ upwards the hours people spend in paid work. Assuming people value their consumption relative to others and that a global consumer culture places the life-styles of the most affluent as the key consumer referent group, then ‘the average individual needs to earn more money’ (Schor 1998: 123). The logic of global capitalism is that people work more to consume more. The difficulty with this argument, and to some extent those of rationalization and economic restructuring, is that central to these theories is that people are spending more time in paid work. While this is (marginally) true for the professional middle classes during the period between the early 1980s and late 1990s, it is not the case for all social groups, and time diary evidence shows a significant and progressive decline of time spent in paid work over the course of the twentieth century (Gershuny 2000).

Given this empirical conundrum, the fourth group of accounts set out to explain why people may feel more time pressured even when time spent in paid and unpaid work appears to be on a long-term trajectory of decline. Linder’s (1970) harried leisure class is the catalyst for a range of accounts which point to the intensification of leisure practices. Such accounts variously highlight how leisure has become less leisurely as people rush to cram more and more leisure activities into finite time. Gershuny (2005) goes so far as to claim that busyness has become a ‘badge of honour’; a principal source of social status. Other accounts consider the impacts of reflexive modernization. Darier (1998) suggests that being busy is symbolic of a ‘full’ and ‘valued’ life. In his conceptualization of the problem, reflexive modernization and the requirement of individuals to narrate their identity through styles of consumption (see Bauman 1988 and Giddens 1991 for a detailed exposition of this theory) brings with it the demands of trying new and varied experiences, and it is this which leads individuals toward the infinite pursuit of more cultural practices. Being busy is hypothesized as a necessary requirement of reflexive identity formation.

The fifth and final set of accounts draws attention to transformations in the temporal ordering of social life. Innovations in communication technologies produce time-space compression where constraints related to time and space are progressively decoupled (Giddens 1991). Under such conditions, Rosa (2003)

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suggests that contemporary society is an experience of acceleration. With time and space no longer constraining communications and with more and more cultures opening up to be sampled and appropriated, everyday life comes to be experienced as one of acceleration – everything is faster because time and space no longer represent constraints on the tempo of activities.

The main, and crucial, difficulty with all these accounts is their assumption of ‘past temporal conditions. Theories are built around a vision of a society where everyone has time to spend with those whom they care most about, a time when everyday life was straightforward with fewer work, domestic and consumer-related time pressures. While this criticism may be read as a highly stylized characterization of a range of different theoretical accounts, the point that these accounts pay little attention to the empirical analysis of past daily lives is difficult to counter. In attempting to provide an empirically driven theoretical account of the changing temporal organization of daily life, this chapter takes ‘day in the life of’ diaries from 1937 and analyses them in relation to data collected in a research project that began in 2000. A practice-based analytical approach, which focuses on the temporal conditioning of what people ‘do’, is applied to both sets of data. A discussion of the data is followed by a brief overview of the key findings from the contemporary research project. The 1937 ‘day in the life of’ diaries are then discussed in relation to four categories: temporal rhythms; negotiating time; relationships; and temporal experiences. In conclusion, it is argued that the mechanisms that organize temporalities in 2000 bear a strong resemblance to the mechanisms of temporal organization in 1937. What has changed is that institutionally timed events are no longer as fixed within the temporal rhythms of daily life such that the collective coordination of practices, particularly those connected with inter-personal relationships, has been undermined. In 2000, the personal coordination of practices was a central challenge to daily life; a challenge that was absent from the diaries of 1937.

Mass Observation ‘Day in the Life of’ Diaries and Household Interviews: A Practice-based Approach

The chapter employs two sources of data: household interviews from 2000 and ‘day in the life of’ diaries from 1937. Interviews were conducted with twenty households (a total of twenty-seven respondents) located in a suburb of Bristol, England. The sample comprised single households, couples with and without children, and the ages of respondents varied between 25 and 65 years. Some were dual-income households, some professionals and some retired, thus providing a range of demographic and socio-economic status groups. Respondents were contacted via letter sent to every other house in the most and least expensive streets of the town. The interviews were semi-structured, lasted, on average, two hours and the interviewer adopted a conversational approach (Douglas 1985). Respondents were asked whether they felt society, in general, was more time pressured than in the past, whether they felt pressed for time, to recount and reflect on the previous week and week-end day, and to describe how they organized the passage of time in their daily lives.

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The Mass Observation project is a social scientific research organization established in 1937 with the aim of creating an ‘Anthropology of Ourselves’. The original studies comprised a national panel of volunteers who responded on a regular basis to questionnaires and directives. On the coronation of King George VI (12 May 1937) the first ‘day in the life of diaries’ were collected as a directive to volunteers. Diarists were then asked to repeat the diary format on every twelfth day of the month thereafter. Five hundred people recorded diaries, although because the sample was based on volunteers it was not nationally representative.

The diaries analysed here were collected on two days in 1937: Saturday, 12 June and Monday, 12 July. Fourteen female diarists were selected on the basis of the legibility of the diaries on both days. Detailed socio-demographic variables of diarists were not collected to the degree that is common practice in contemporary social scientific research, but a crude breakdown of background variables was amenable. As Table 3.1 indicates, the diaries analysed were written by women of different ages, most of whom were ‘housewives’, married with children and twothirds were middle class.

Given the format of the two datasets, it would be wrong to suggest they are comparable. At best, the two sets of data provide indications and tentative signs of changing temporal rhythms. Diarists were asked to record what they did and how they felt (their mood) on that particular day. This resulted in variations of the way the day was recorded. In some cases diarists recorded their day in the form of a time diary (e.g. 7.00 a.m. got out of bed; 7.10 a.m. made cup of tea); others wrote a paragraph outlining the rhythm of the day. By contrast, household interviews provided scope to explore temporalities of social practices in more detail. The interviews explored the length of time respondents allocated to particular practices (duration), the pace of the practice (tempo), whether the practice was performed simultaneously with other people or in conjunction with another practice (synchronization), how frequently the practice was performed (periodicity), and in what order (sequence). It was impossible to recover this detail of the temporalities of practices from the diaries.

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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).

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Temporal Rhythms of Daily Life in 1937

The most notable difference between 1937 and 2000 was the amount of work (both paid and unpaid) conducted by women; the few mentions of time outside of domestic work were presented as fleeting moments of rest. This was illustrated by the extent to which paid and domestic work dominated the Saturday diaries. Table 3.2 provides a summary of all reported leisure activities for the total sixty-three observers on Saturday, 12 June.

Despite it appearing that, on average, each diarist enjoyed a leisure activity on the Saturday, and that eight of the fourteen sampled diarists stated Saturday to be a ‘day of leisure’, when leisure activities are read within context it becomes clear they were allocated around a variety of work practices. The breakdown of leisure practices for the entire sample appears relatively bountiful. However, when those practices are read within the context of each diary, moments of leisure, like for the Monday diaries, appeared fleeting or ‘snatched’. Consider the complete diary for Saturday, 12 June (1937) of Mrs Beken (a married housewife with four children who lived in Kent and whose husband was a farm labourer).

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