Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture

Practice-Time Profiles

I use the term ‘practice-time profiles’ to refer to embedded conventions of duration, sequence and timing associated with the competent performance of a practice. As this hybrid phrase suggests, the details of everyday scheduling reflect and reproduce practice-based obligations and notions of propriety. These take various forms. Conventions of timing are important for doing and for interpreting a range of ordinary practices. In Zerubavel’s words: ‘[W]e have relatively fixed notions of what constitutes “the proper time”. It is almost inconceivable, for example, that an event such as a dance would be scheduled for the morning (even on non-working days)’ (1981: 8). Likewise, phoning at 3 a.m. is itself a signal of some kind of emergency. ‘During off-call times for the telephone (say before nine in the morning and after ten at night for adult members of the middle class) a phone ringing may cause alarm (Goffman 1971: 300–301, cited in Zerubavel 1981: 23). While these arrangements are matters of social convention – in some sub-cultures it is perfectly normal to go dancing at dawn or to phone at night – other forms of scheduling intersect with natural rhythms of seasonality and decay: hence patterns of digging and harvesting garden crops and of painting woodwork before the rot sets in.

There are further senses in which timing is critical. The effective movement and coordination of the body is clearly vital for practices as varied as those of fixing of car engines, windsurfing or playing tennis. Dant and Bowles’ (2002) study of the intricately sequenced work of car repair gives a sense the embodied and materialized ordering of process. They write as follows:

The technician has within their body an understanding of how a task should proceed and rarely needs to consult other colleagues or manuals. Their approach to the task seems to have the structure of a sequence of actions that need to be completed: removal of road wheel, removal of brake disc etc. to get access to the constant velocity (CV) joint, removal of damaged CV boot, removal of contaminated grease, replacement with appropriate grease, replacement of boot, refitting of brake disc, road wheel etc. This sequenced pattern of action is largely determined by the designed-in properties of the objects involved. (Dant and Bowles 2002: 13)

In this instance, sequence is so much part of doing that a single error will spoil the entire performance. In other, more forgiving situations, taking too long, finishing too quickly or doing things in the wrong order signals incompetence but does not result in total failure. By way of illustration, the Mass Observation Study’s report into the culture and organization of drinking in a UK town comments in detail on the phenomenon of ‘drinking level’ (Mass Observation 1987). Partly but not entirely due to the convention of buying rounds (each member of a party takes turns to buy drinks for everyone else), the rate at which an individual drinks is ‘controlled’ by a usually unstated but nonetheless effective convention of mutual synchronization. If anyone drinks ‘too fast’ or ‘too slow’, the balance of the whole is thrown out of kilter.

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And so one could continue. The point is not to document all possible temporal dimensions of doing but rather to notice that they exist, that such characteristics are integral rather than coincidental features, and that these time-related qualities are themselves subject to change. Before turning to related but more complicated questions of coordination, I want to say a bit more about how practice-time profiles evolve and intersect.

How is it that arrangements previously defined as inappropriate short-cuts (e.g. the working lunch; regular use of ready-meals or reliance on instant coffee), or as exceptional rather than usual arrangements (e.g. taking a day trip from London to Brussels), have become the norm, at least for some? In reflecting on these questions, commentators write in rather general terms about the speeding up of society and the increasingly widespread experience of being hurried and harried (Southerton et al. 2001). In keeping with the view that time is part of practice, it makes sense to focus not on the pace of life or the shrinking of distance as such but on new combinations and configurations of doing – commuting, multi-tasking, day tripping – which take root around infrastructural affordances like those associated with mobile technologies or with faster means and modes of travel.

In addition, and as already mentioned, it is important to notice that the practicetime profiles of specific activities are shaped and influenced by each other and by deliberate efforts to structure routines and habits. For example, the very notion of ‘prime-time TV’ is itself an outcome of conscious programming (by producers) and of a co-evolving convention of settling down in front of the screen (by consumers) at a certain time of day.⁴ As these comments indicate, interpretations of possible, potential and proper time and timing are critical for the ongoing reproduction (and transformation) of specific practices and for sometime supportive, sometimes uneasy relations between them.

Such considerations are also relevant for understandings of what it is to do and to be a practitioner, and hence for the recruitment and defection of specific populations of practice carriers. The idea that certain pursuits are appropriate to people of different age, gender or social class contributes to the persistence of a temporal ordering of propriety variously policed by laws (under-age drinking; sex) and social pressures of one kind or another (e.g. disapproval of ‘mutton dressed as lamb’; norms of starting and stopping smoking, etc.).

As Philip Ariès’s social history of childhood makes clear, such conventions are culturally and historically specific. In 1600, people beyond the age of three or four ‘played the same games as the adult, either with other children or with adults’ (Ariès 1962: 71). Over subsequent centuries, adults, especially of the upper classes, abandoned or transformed these games and in the process introduced and reproduced age-related distinctions and differences which had not existed before. According to Ariès, the cumulative result – not only of games playing, but also of other institutionalized ways of doing – is a society organised around increasingly precisely calibrated repertoires of distinct ‘ways of life’.⁵ Recognizable phases of life are distinguished one from another through the specification and enactment of appropriately ‘childish’ practices. The sociotemporal invention of childhood is consequently important in structuring the days and doings not only of young people, but of adults too. In so far as the same applies to other categories like those of class and gender, the terrain of practice-time is criss-crossed (and made) by the daily working out of all manner of distinctions (Bourdieu 1984).

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These and other accounts of long-range societal transformation generally point in the direction of growing cultural and temporal fragmentation. In the next section, I turn this framing around and instead ask about the kinds of complexes and configurations of practice-time that might have these shattering effects and that might generate seemingly new challenges of coordination.

Coordinating Everyday Life

Some forms of coordination and synchronization emerge by virtue of what Zerubavel refers to as the ‘social fact’ (Zerubavel 1979: 107) of a sociotemporal order that exists beyond the individuals whose lives are organized and whose experiences are recalled and calibrated around it. Others require more deliberate planning and intervention. The significance of each form and the relation between them arguably depends upon the sum total of practice-time profiles within any one society, and on the manner in which they intersect.

Despite an apparent erosion of collective rhythms and schedules, the spreading of the day (thanks to electric lighting, and more recently to 24-hour opening) and the multiplication of discrete episodes, the extent of sociotemporal coordination remains impressive. The ‘shoulders’ of the London rush hour are getting broader and broader (according to Transport for London, the morning ‘peak’ now runs from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m.), yet Wright’s account of the rhythm of this city remains instantly recognizable. In his words,

Nine tenths of [the working force], despite some attempt to stagger office hours, start homeward within the same 90 minutes, queuing for buses in vacuous resignation, squeezing in indecent intimacy in the Underground, rather than linger awhile in park or café; for who will await the roomy 6:30 if he can just find standing room in the 5:45. (Wright 1968: 216, cited in Zerubavel 1981: 66)

Zerubavel highlights the infrastructural consequences of Wright’s description of the ‘almost complete identity between personal and collective schedules and rhythms’, and the problems this presents for urban designers faced with ‘unbearably congested peak periods around rush hours in the streets and in the public transportation systems, around mealtimes at restaurants, and during weekends and holidays on the road and on the beaches’. He goes on to note ‘the implications of temporal symmetry as a way of life on the consumption of energy (electricity, heating gas, and so on) (Zerubavel 1981: 66), and it is indeed the case that many elements of material infrastructure – including ovens, cars, reservoirs and power stations⁶ – are sized in such a way as to cope with peak demands (Wilhite and Lutzenhiser 1999).

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Given the economic and environmental costs of social synchronization, it is perhaps not surprising that governments and others have sought to level these peaks by setting lower tariffs for night-time electricity use or through more forceful methods designed to spread the times at which people take their holidays. In the Netherlands, for example, dates for school summer holidays are decided by the Ministry of Education, which sets different periods for each of three regions. Although this strategy might have advantages for the country as a whole, and for holiday resorts in particular, such methods generate new problems of coordination for those who want to enjoy the summer with people who live in another region.

While some forms of coordination ‘just happen’, the effective accomplishment of many practices – like that of holidaying as a family – frequently requires deliberate scheduling and synchronization. In documenting the growing importance of diaries and, as they are so aptly named, ‘personal organizers’, Symes argues that their popularity indicates a shift from highly structured ‘industrial time’, characterized by a collective societal rhythm, to a more contingent form of ‘professional time’ in which each individual has a timetable of his or her own (Symes 1999: 372). Whether this distinction holds or not, a proliferation both of autonomy and of convenience devices is likely to increase the sum total of arranging required to bring several people, each locked into idiosyncratic schedules, together in the same place at the same time.

Observations of this kind have led numerous commentators to claim that there has been a loosening of shared temporal order, a decline in social capital and a consequent loss of community (Putnam 2000). However popular and persuasive these claims might be, it is difficult to put them to the test without first devising some way of characterizing and comparing the practice-time complexion of different societies and of showing how they change. In the final part of this chapter I speculate somewhat wildly on what this might involve.

Characterizing Practice-Timescapes

In these last few paragraphs I stray beyond the limits of methodological plausibility and fantasize about how practice-timescapes (these being composed of the intersection of all coexisting practice-time profiles) might be represented, starting with an imaginary societal synchronization index (SSI). Not quite the same as a measure of organic or mechanical solidarity, but not entirely unrelated either, such an index would capture the extent to which the practice complex of a given society generates and requires synchronous performances. Assuming the SSI could be deployed over time, it would show whether more solitary practices are edging collective ones out of the frame and taking more time than before. Based on Figures 1.2 and 1.3, and all other things being equal, one might expect France to score higher on such an index than Finland – especially at lunchtime. More fanciful still, a suitably subtle version of such an index (the SSSSI) might be sensitive enough to detect feedback circuits in the personal and collective logistics of daily life. Understandably enough, efforts to assess the social and temporal impact of London’s congestion charging scheme⁷ focused on the immediate aftermath. However, before and after surveys suggest that the scheme’s effects are continually reconfigured as people adjust to the responses of others – for instance, visiting friends and family at the week-end, when charges do not apply, but resorting to other strategies when faced with the new problems of social coordination that arise now that everyone wants to visit at the week-end (MORI 2004). In effect, Londoners and visitors create and re-create the consequences of congestion charging as they respond not only to the scheme itself but also to the responses and reactions of other people. This results in ebbs and flows in the spatial and temporal distribution of practices and is in turn of consequence for competitive relations between them.

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Accordingly, there is a sense in which it is difficult to interpret the SSI without also having a good understanding of the chart-atlas of contemporary practice (CACP). In so far as they constitute recognizable entities, practices have potentially identifiable spatial and temporal coordinates, that is, practice-time profiles. The CACP, which represents the totality of contemporary practices in terms of related injunctions or compulsions, minutes of attention required and associated features of sequence and timing, can also be used to plot the social-spatial distribution of specific practices. The CACP can, for example, reveal all those social groups and societies in which extremely time-hungry sports like golf are established and in which they exist as something that people routinely do. The latest versions of the CACP can be calibrated to represent a day or a lifetime and can be adjusted to produce formal estimates of practice squeeze.⁸

There are already precedents for the CACP, but on a much more limited scale. Oskar Korkman (2006) has, for example, sought to categorize the spatial and temporal qualities of the usefully limited array of possibilities open to families travelling on cruise ships between Finland and Sweden. This exercise, based on observation and interviews with literally captive respondents, suggested that the cruising experience was marked by tensions between the contrasting temporalities of child- and adult-orientated practices, and between activities properly undertaken together or alone. Korkman, who is a management consultant, makes a number of practical suggestions based on his analysis. Maybe the shipping line could reduce family frictions by introducing things to do that are not as temporally incompatible as the current array of practices on offer. The suggestion that organizations might get involved in what Korkman refers to as ‘practice design’⁹ is intriguing, as is the possibility that companies might deliberately scan contemporary configurations of practice-time looking for niches of opportunity in the current eco-system of daily life. Systematic studies, perhaps based on methods of time-space geography, might well reveal empty moments waiting to be colonized or point to gaps associated with the disappearance or modification of practices the effective accomplishment of which used to be especially demanding.

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This possibility brings me to the fossilisation-innovation-transformation index (FITI), the third and final instrument in my imaginary tool-kit. Properly applied, the FITI gives a sense both of the rate at which practices are changing, and of the relative plasticity or rigidity (lock-in) of the interlocking systems of practice of which society is composed.

Although the SSI, the CACP and the FITI are the stuff of future fiction, something along these lines is arguably required if we are to build on May and Thrift’s conclusion that ‘a sense of social time is made and re-made according to social practices’ (May and Thrift 2001: 5). Equally, and as my account of these three measures makes clear, operationalizing this idea on any scale seems to be an impossibly complicated task. Fortunately, all is not lost.

While the project of capturing the temporal qualities of always-changing, alwaysintersecting practices of everyday life does seem to be overwhelmingly ambitious, the process of thinking about it has served to crystallize a handful of more modest but plausible observations. The first of these concerns the limits of studying time and time use in ways that are detached from the dynamics and distributions of practice. Writing about rhythm and routine as if these could be separated from the specific details of doing seems misguided. Second, if the aim is to document the temporal configuration of daily life, matters of sequence and coordination are as significant as those of duration and deserve just as much attention. Third, those engaged in time-use studies should recognize that the practices they track and trail are far from stable and that it is important to keep a watchful eye on the changing composition of everyday life.

Notes

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1. Donzelot (1980) offers an explicitly Foucauldian account of similar transformations, underlining the political and economic significance of temporal structuring as a technique of disciplining and (self-)policing.

1. Large enough to take the Christmas turkey; to transport at least four people and their luggage; to meet all but the most extreme demands of winter or summer.

1. From February 2003, people driving a car into central London between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. have had to pay a congestion charge, initially of £5 and now of £8.

1. The respondent quoted at the start of this chapter gives a colloquial expression of this phenomenon when describing the challenge of fitting everything in and bemoaning the fact that ‘you haven’t got the time to do as much as what you want in a day nowadays’.

1. Korkman works for a management consultancy called Vectia. The following statements are taken from Vectia’s website. ‘Practices are defined as ways of doing. Examples of people’s everyday practices in consumer markets are walking (shoes), eating (restaurants), working (IT support systems). Companies can gain significant benefits from exploring their markets in the terms of practices . . . Practice Design^TM differs from traditional market research: instead of studying what customers think, feel and say, we concentrate on finding out what people actually do or what is really done in business’ (http://www.vectia.com/?Deptid= 2588, accessed 31 March 2009).

References

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• Elizabeth Shove

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