Pathologies and Policies of Time
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. Ecclesiastes 3
Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or thrown away, five shillings besides. Benjamin Franklin
Introduction - natural time and clock time
Time is our orientation to the experience of change. In addition to our use of clock time we all have a broader sense of temporality - an awareness of flow and transcience; beginnings and endings; durations and phase length; periodicity with amplitude; tempo, speed, acceleration and deceleration; the cycle of birth, maturation, decline, death and decay - as well as rebirth, seasonality and cyclical return. Time and temporal consciousness are our means of orientating ourselves to natural processes (the seasons and the cycles of day and night) and human processes. Since the beginning of human history the routine patterns of social and individual activity have been orientated to the natural cycles - our work and domestic activities have been organised around day and night hours, around the twenty eight day menstrual cycle, around the seasons.
The argument of this paper is that there is a growing deviation between natural time and clock time. Put in another way - our temporal orientation, our time consciousness, has been distorted by an undue reliance on clock time organised for money making and for economic purposes. We are unaware of, and pay too little heed to, crucial dimensions of the temporal organisation of nature and ecological processes, of our own bodies, of our unequal social organisation and of our minds. Instead we have an undue fixation on the temporal organisation of the money economy. In this essay I will show that this matters for the health of the ecology of the planet, it matters for the health of our social structures, for our interpersonal relationships and it matters for minds and our bodies.
By natural time I mean the natural cycle and periodicity of our bodies which evolved inside the cycles of nature and of the seasons. These biological cycles are wrapped in the cosmological ones - as the earth turns on its axis and spins around the sun. We cannot escape the fact that our biological evolution has evolved us, like other species, to respond to the cycle of day and night for example - our body temperature, our blood pressure, our concentration, memory, our levels of attentiveness and innattentiveness, glucose levels, activity levels, urine production, capacity to digest fats, hunger signals, sexual and other hormones, as well as our sleep patterns, all function on a circadian (day and night 24 hour) rhythms. These cycles are of very great importance for our physical and mental health. As we shall see, however, modern time management is beginning to exact a toll on our health as these rhythms are increasingly ignored and abused.
By natural time I also mean the temporal features of Nature, of the ecological process. A great deal of study has been made of the spatial dimensions of ecology but, in recent years, there has been a dawning realisation of the need also to understand the temporal dimensions of Nature. For example, flooding around the world has led to study of the time patternings of flows in river systems which have considerable local and regional planning applications. The behaviour of a river system displays a rhythmic space-time relationship between landscape and climatic conditions. River depth and shape; the absorption capacities and run-off features of catchment areas and surrounding countryside and towns, with their different vegetation and biotop features; the seasonal cycles of rainfall and snow melt etc. - all these effect the amplitude, the durations, the periodicity of low and high water and river speed. In short, rivers have time characteristics. In a variety of ways, human effects on the environment in general (global warming and its effect on rainfall), as well as specific time-space adjustments to rivers for human economic needs (like river deepening and straightening for all year navigability)have led to profound effects on the temporal dimensions of rivers and their flood patterns. (Müller - Wohlfeil D.Mißachtung natürlicher Rhythmen in Adam B., Geißler K. and Held M. (eds.) Die Non-Stop Gesellschaft und ihr Preis Stuttgart 1998 pp 149 - 169)
The industrial economy, as I shall show, is blind to many of its temporal dimensions. Of course, it is aware of the time it takes to make things, to market them, and the time that they remain in use. All these are relevant to the calculations of money making and households. However, after "use" the material substances that make up products, with all their chemical, physical and biological properties, remain in existence as part of the ecological process. Obsolescent and used products have a temporal character of great importance - even if we turn our back on them and render them out of sight, out of mind. A starting point for sustainable production is the recognition that the longer human created/processed substances remain in the natural ecological process the greater the danger that they will have a destructive effect on the ecological process and its organisms. In this respect laboratory based science, based on short term experiments, under controlled conditions, can tell us little about the long term effects of the presence of a great many industrial products left in the environment - as it is only over time that the effects can be known. (Sabine Hofmeister "Zeit der Erneurung" in Adam B., Geißler K. and Held M. (eds.) Die Non-Stop Gesellschaft und ihr Preis Stuttgart 1998 pp 185-200 )
Clock Time
Such things are rarely of concern for people who are fixated on clock time. Clock time, is a social synchronisation system of the money economy, of government and energy guzzling technologies - it is invariable, standardised and universally applicable in 24 time zones around the world centred around Greenwich mean time. It is the time that you "spend" rather than the time you "pass". The central idea here is that time is a resource which is "not to be wasted" because "time is money". Wasting time is to forego the opportunity to earn money. As Barbara Adam puts it this kind of clock time, is a 'non temporal time'. It is decontextualised and disembodied from events - "one hour....is the same regardless of whether the time is in question refers to the day or the night, in Newfoundland or South Africa, during summer or winter. This content is irrelevant."
It is this kind of time consciousness which prevails in the financial markets which are open twenty four hours around the globe. In the markets everything else take second place to making money. As one trader, Michael Marcus, puts it, describing the situation in the mid 1980s " I was probably one of the biggest currency traders in the world, including the banks. It was very exhausting because it was already a 24 hour market. When I went to sleep I would wake up every two hours to check the market as it opened: Australia, Hong Kong, Zurich and London. It killed my marriage." (quoted in Leon Kreitzman, The 24 Hour Society, Profile Books 1999 p 26).
Money addiction is like any other addiction - everything else takes second place to getting the next fix. The main social relationships are organised around the next fix, as are the addicts thought processes. It is the addicts main occupation and their main (mental) pre-occupation. It is the purpose of living. Michael Marcus's marriage took second place and he presumably therefore found it impossible to synchronise his emotional and family life with his partner - because he was synchronising himself instead with the money markets.
As we shall see - synchronizing money making activities in a way that allows space for an emotional and personal life is increasingly a problem for all of us. Increasingly people are being worn out trying to keep pace. One estimate of the economic costs of accidents caused by tiredness across the world is $400 billion dollars a year. ( Zulley, J. Menschliche Rythmen und der Preis ihrer Mißachtung in Adam B., Geißler K. and Held M. (eds.) Die Non-Stop Gesellschaft und ihr Preis Stuttgart 1998 p 117. ) The $400 billion figure includes the costs from the accidents themselves, the production and quality control losses that follow, the health care, social and security costs. To get a sense of the scale of this sum - it is equivalent to the marketised value of the world's food supply for a whole year.
The Short term and the long term - discounting the future
Unfortunately the world and its synchronisation is increasingly organised to suit people like Michael Marcus. If $400 billion seems a large sum then it should be put in perspective. Every day twice that sum is traded on the international currency markets by people like him. The global financial markets, corporations and institutions in turn set the context for economic production. It is intrinsic to the nature of the financial system that the people who work in it, and for it, have an essentially short term view - which includes no long term loyality to any place or to any community.
With the invention of joint stock companies and stock markets on which shares can be traded it has become easy for owners to walk away from the companies they own by selling their shares. In order to prevent owners from walking away like this company managers aim for short term profits and tend to avoid planning for the long haul. There is no commitment to long term assets or to people and communities involved in production. This has a profound bearing on policies of environmental sustainability or other measures aimed at long term health and well being which have an inter-generational time frame. Where assets can be turned into money easily time horizons tend to become shorter. In the world of economic logic the future is discounted. £1,000 in 10 years time can be earned by £386 now at a compound 10% interest rate. Thus asset values of £1,000 in ten years are held to be only worth £386 in the here and now. By the same logic £1,000,000 in a hundred years time is worth only £75 today. But a hundred years time is the time in which environmental (un)sustainability has already longed kicked in. At the Rio Conference world governments signed a treaty to guarantee future generations will not live at a lower level than this generation - but the financial markets work on the principle that a £1,000,000 for our children's children is only worth £75 to us now. ( Barbara Adam Timescapes of Modernity, Routledge ,1999, pp 74-75).
We live, then, racing to keep up with the money junkies who are speeding in the present. Economic time is organised on the principle that any and ever purchasable thing should be available, as far as possible, anywhere you want it, any time you want it. The consequence is that everything must function round the clock 7 days a week - and that means people working in the night and at weekends. Production is organised by 'just in time' manufacture and delivery systems - which requires flexible work forces always contactable at any time by a mobile phone. Distances are cut down to size by faster and faster transport technologies, by chemical and refrigeration systems which hold perishable goods in suspended animation and by communications systems that bind places together through data transmitted at the speed of light.
Time and Social Co-ordination
The co-ordination of a troop in a march is done by the beat of a drum. The co-ordination of an orchestra takes place through the up and down beat of the conductors baton. The co-ordination of processes in a computer is to be found in the oscillations of its central processor - at so many megahertz. The pulse of time holds together the whole. Whereas in previous centuries the pace of time was regulated by the day and night rhythms of light and darkness, the rhythms of the moon on the tides, and the rhythms of the seasons with their times for sowing and harvest time has now become linear. The clocks do not even go round in circles any more. They are digital statements.
In the so called "developed countries" a social synchronisation of schedules, appointments, meetings and deadlines takes place organised on this digital pulse. The pace of these synchronised activities is accelerating - and society and human consciousness with it - a fact which is even noticeable in music itself. When Beethoven conducted his Eroica Symphony it took him 60 minutes to complete it. Leonard Bernstein needed 53 minutes when playing it in Vienna, but in New York, the faster city, 49 minutes and 30 seconds, Herbert von Karajan did it in 50 minutes and 10 seconds whereas Michael Gielen, in 1987, conducted it in 43 minutes. (the figures are from Karlheinz A. Geißler Vom Tempo der Welt pp 91-92). While writing this essay I heard the Berlin Symphony Orchestra play the Eroica in Nottingham. They took 48 minutes. Far from the fast pace adding to the excitement a friend who was with me described it as "clipped" and "ungenerous". It was no longer a heroic symphony - merely a rushed symphony, played at machine pace, on a whistlestop tour. Of course, many people nowadays prefer techno music at 180 beats a minute....
It was in Benedictine monastries that this modern linear concept of time was first born. Before the invention of mechanical clocks it was quite impossible to set a definite time, in the modern sense, to co-ordinate events, appointments, schedules, deadlines and processes between people. Only dawn and dusk had any definiteness - which is why duels were set for dawn. There were, of course, sun dials. But you couldn't guarantee it would not be cloudy and they were unusable at night. All one could do before clocks was to set appointments and arrangements to occur during common arrangements of event time - for example arranging to meet at that time of day that the cows always go for a drink - when one might therefore regularly meet anyway, or at a regular market that happened every few weeks. Time was still temporal - it had a content. Event time arrangements, and an event-time consciousness of temporality, are still to be found in the Third World.
White People's Time
It is easy to fall into a view a culturally superior view that the "correct" consciousness of time, and the correct way to organise and "use" it is that of a modern industrial society. But it is wiser to use the different perceptions and concepts of time from the Third World as prompts to rethink many of our assumptions about development. It is true that in terms of material production many Third World societies are poor - however in terms of the availability of time such societies are often very rich.
Last year my organisation, Ecoworks, invited a permaculture consultant, who works with tribal people in South Asia to give a talk. He spoke of people whose status in Indian society is very low, but who work a three or four day week. It is their conscious choice was not to accumulate material possessions - they prefer to work less than us, in order that they can take the rest of the time for socialising and leisure. Most third world societies still have more holidays than First World ones.
In the industrial countries there is a view of history, tainted by imperial superiority, in which time has a forward movement - we refer to "progress". From this cultural viewpoint we live in "developed" countries - a status which Third World societies have not yet graduated to. Yet many people in Third World societies refer to "white people's time" in an implicit critique of own assumptions about how society is organised. It helps us see that the imperialist past was not just about flags, mines and plantations. It was also about building railroad and running trains that ran according to timetables. Imperial culture was a set of self imposed compulsions about punctuality and performance that can, from another perspective, be regarded as crazy. Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. Other people have a snooze. Other people use time more sensibly - or, better said, they live in time in a different way. In his description of Trinidad time, social psychologist, J Jones describes how "During my time in Trinidad I learned that people had a personal control over their time. They came and went more or less as they wanted and as they felt like. 'I don't feel like going to work today' is a normal statement which expresses this alternative. Time is more determined by peoples behaviour than by the clock. Things began when people came, and come to an end when they go, not when the clock strikes eight or one." (from 'An exploration of temporarility in human behaviour' in quoted in a Geography of Time by Robert Levine)
In the Orient too a different view of time has long prevailed. The Chinese philosophy of Taoism expresses the wisdom of minimal action, the case for not doing things. 'Acting on the world' tends to produce unwanted re-actions. It is often better, at most, to help them unfold, to let them occur, to take their course in their own natural time. Letting things occur includes letting things occur (mentally) to oneself - i.e. giving oneself time to contemplate one's own actions and their results. In Chinese thought the I Ching plays a special role. It is an oracle whose aim is to convey to those who consult it a sense of the spirit of the time and put oneself in harmony with the universe, holding back in unfavourable times and going forward at the appropriate ones.
In primarily agrarian cultures people are aware that time passes anyway. Humans do not need to intervene. Things can be allowed to develop of their own accord because Nature, the broader ecological process and cosmic process, is perceived as having its own role to play in 'productivity'. Indeed the "yield" (of harvests) is far more determined by Nature than by humans. Time is seasonal and cyclical. To protect oneself against the unpredictable fluctuations of Nature one lives and cultivates cautiously.
Monastery Time - blame the Benedictines
Things were not always hurried and punctual in Europe. In the Middle Ages, one third of the year was holidays.
The monasteries however started the change. According to the regulations of St Benedict, monasteries were organised in a strict and rigid routine on the basis of "points in time". The word 'punctuality' evolved from the meaning of "point time" from the German/Anglo-Saxon word 'punkt' for point. In order to regulate the monastic kind of day, that started at the unnatural hour of 1.30am, the monks had a clock that struck a bell every hour. (The German word 'Glock' means bell - the english word 'clock' evolved from this linguistic root). Mechanical clocks were developed and became the basis for social organisation - the life of the monastry was in a fixed sequence, with rituals and activities of fixed duration, starting and finishing at fixed time points, with a regular frequency. This was the basis for "linear time". Time as a social co-ordinative system became regular . In monasteries, and then in armies, waking, reporting for duty, tasks, meals, rest were collectively co-ordinated together in the parameters of this new 'regular time' - involving fixed sequences, fixed durations which started and finished at fixed time points.
This spread over into the organisation of urban life and wherever the time of wage labourers was purchased. In earlier times 'jobs' as such barely existed. People did whatever tasks needed to be done - making themselves useful as and when. However wage labour was different. Punctuality (for work) became a virtue. As the (purchased) time of wage labour came to be seen as a resource, its durations were divided up into clock measurable segments which were not be wasted - as a taken for granted ethic of life. In Calvin's Geneva the protestant ethic of punctuality, the clock, and of work, evolved hand it hand. It was a very deterministic philosophy. You got what you deserved. Your future salvation were measured in your past efforts.
It was still thought, however, that it was possible to say, exactly, when God created the Earth. The discovering of geological time changed that. The interpretation of layers upon layers of rocks, with their contents of fossils, suddenly put humanity in a hugely longer time frame. But it was technology, economics and fuel powered machines that changed time consciousness most of all.
The technological history of time
If "time is money" it followed that pauses and breaks, rest times, became unproductive time - such time meant money that was not made, lost money. The new god was 'efficiency'. Technology allowed the co-ordination of larger numbers of people and became the basis for organising factories. Breaking down the labour-process into smaller parts in the factories allowed for the application of fuel powered machinery to be applied to production. The products were distributed to markets on fuel powered railroads. The railroads and the telegraph created the conditions for unified time zones and unified railway timetables. Gas, and then electric lighting, made possible the taming of nighttime and night work. It was necessary to invent the alarm clock in order to guarantee people would wake up.
Whereas in the agrarian society time - economics was about seasonal harvests where Nature played its part, now things happened in time (in engineering-think) because people switched them on and then, later, switched them off ( or programmed a device to do this). In their consciousness of time people turn to technologically formed metaphors to understand temporality. For example, the passage of time is thought of using analogies from travel and journeys. (e.g. Project development is described at the consecutive arrival at 'project milestones').
As the technologies developed, time became the measuring rod of "scientific management". The stop watch, held by the time and motion, man started to be used in the service of efficiency. Frederick Taylor's Scientific Management was the next stage in "time is money" time. In a list of the Systems and Procedures Association of America we can read that the following helpful suggestions for appropriate timings: opening and closing filing cabinet drawer without taking anything out = 0.04minutes; opening middle desk drawer = 0.026minutes; closing middle desk drawer = 0.027minutes; getting up from office chair = 0.033 minutes; sitting down on chair = 0.033minutes; turning swivel chair = 0.009 minutes.....(quoted in Robert Levine "Landscapes of Time").
Time consciousness was also altered by the new media of film - moving pictures could be slowed and speeded up or even run backwards. The way they were edited further changed time perception. In a film segments of life are edited out if they are irrelevant to the sequence of the plot and events adjusted to fit neat slots like an hour and a half. On the internationally connected television media we watch an airplane take off in flames and immediately afterwards see interviews with grieving relatives and interviews with accident experts. The perception of time has taken on a sensation of simultaneity - we can watch events happening in another part of the world at the time they happen. The editing and manipulation of mediated perception, as well as the ease of channel changing with the zapper, has led to shorter attention spans.
New telecommunications and computer technologies have moved on the consciousness of time yet again. 'Efficiency', 'deregulation', 'flexibility' are required so that we can have 24 hour information, production, consumption, administration, buying and selling In fact the pace of change has itself become the way of measuring "progress". Things are thought to be getting better if they are getting faster . The "future" is somehow superior to the past because it is accelerating.
Technological and social change have meant that societies have become ever more complex. In urban centres there are more things that can be done - and more things that 'must' be done. Time management is consequently more complicated. Diaries are replaced by filofaxes and then by electronic organisers.
The greater the complexity to be co-ordinated the greater the time taken in co-ordinating time. Who has not taken out their diaries (or organisers) at a meeting and struggled to find a time when everyone can meet? Who has not wanted some information, or approval for an idea, but been unable to get hold of the relevant persons needed on the phone, and been stalled, unable to move on to the next step of their work sequence - with deadlines approaching? The work of time synchronisation is usually not even mentioned on the job description yet, when you think about it, it is often the most complicated bit of your job. Getting other people to commit themselves to devote their time for your work agenda, at the same times, is the really difficult thing. It is this that gives rise to the greatest amount of stress - what you discuss when they have committed themselves all to come together is comparitvely straightforward.
Time management courses - learning to live under pressure
In an individual such an idea would be given a psychiatric diagnosis - it would be called mania. As the pace of life speeds up studies show that more and more people find themselves under time pressure. Time management courses become ever more popular for harrassed professionals but as Karlheinz A. Geißler points out "The scarcity of time is not the result of inadequate time management but, on the contrary, is the effect of "effective" time management. This drives the intensification of the regulation of things, time organisation, yet further. Time only counts as well used when it is used." ( Karlheinz A. Geißler Zeit - verweile doch...Verlag Herder. Freiburg. 2000 . My translation - BD).
The point here is that one only truly feels that the time pressure is off in those periods in which time is not used, in which things are simply left to occur, for example those times in which one is having a break. Doing as much as possible in order not to waste time, learning to plan down to the smallest detail, is learning how to work in a rush, under pressure. It is, in effect, learning how to be manic......But time is not only a resource to be used for purposeful activity. Time is can also be validly understood as a duration for not doing anything, for letting things happen all by themselves. Thus, quite apart from the need for rest, inactive time is also productive in the sense that things can be left to occur, to ripen of their own accord. In a primarily agrarian society, before the advent of international agribusiness, the idea of things growing and ripening of their own accord, with a little help from humans, makes sense.
In Nature things have their own pace. As Aegidius of Assisi wrote "When the tree germinates it is not immediately big/ When it is big it does not immediately blossom/ When it blossoms it does not immediately bear fruit/ When it bears fruit the fruit are not immediately ripe/ When the fruit are ripe they are not immediately eaten". Alas, agribusiness and genetic engineers see this as a challenge.
Time metaphors which perpetuate control illusions
Unfortunately governments and bureaucracies tend to use time metaphors which foster an illusory sense of security and which convey the feeling that the temporal features of public services planning are easily estimated, managed and controlled. Earlier I pointed out that time is described using metaphors from travel journeys. Politicians and officials think of time like car drivers. Project developers like myself are to predict the future of the projects we are involved in by saying what our "project milestones" will be. Of course, the term and use of "milestones" comes from an age before motorways but the assumption is that development is like "taking a route"(the planned for future) which is known so that one can estimate "where" one will arrive when. Unlike the denationalised railways it is assumed that one can, in principle, keep to a timetable. The more appropriate metaphor, that project development is an exploration of unknown territory, the discovery of new places and drawing the maps as one goes along, is an unwanted thought for our betters. Time must be thought of in a way which gives allows our betters the illusion of control, which allows them to plan, to determine the future according to the blueprint they promised the electorate.
Real life is not like this however. In real life time things unfold.(c.f. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, 1980. This is a book which develops a theory of quantum physics treating all reality as an unbroken whole, a holomovement that unfolds an implicate enfolded order). Problems and opportunities reveal themselves as one goes along. To be effective human beings, social organisations and natural environments must develop organically. The participants of social systems learn as they return again and again, to readjust the differing sides of the organisations or processes that they are immersed in - returning again and again to the objectives, to the human relations, to the communications, to the finances, to the administration of processes, - adjusting each in turn to make a better fit with the inner and outer whole. When things develop organically, they do not develop along linear lines but as parts of interdependent wider wholes. Organic development thinking recognises that temporal processes reveal hidden new sides as they evolve - these will seem obvious, but only with hindsight.
New starts then contain the lessons of what has gone before. After people, organisations or plants have been 'unfolded' they are later 'enfolded'. Personal experience is converted into interpreted memories, collective experience into texts containing jointly relevant lessons, while plants convert their experience into seeds. All, at a later stage unfold, in a new context to create the future. "Joined up thinking" is organic - it evolves according to on-the-spot realities rather than being laid down precriptively, as milestones and targets on fantasy route maps, specified by our betters from afar, and from on high. From afar, and from on high, our betters too often to not have the relevant experience to enfold practical future visions.
Time in Community Development
The insistence that one develops according to the banal thinking of car drivers has consequences. It is difficult, for example, to fit the development of many community organisations into the bureaucratic categories demanded by their milestone seeking funders. Particularly problematic are the earliest stages of developing community organisations, the so called "capacity building phase". Rational administration and planning usually work with systems based on identifying and establishing regular patterns of activity. But at the capacity building stage of community organisation things are often sporadic, exploratory and unclear. For example, one establishes a procedure for bookkeeping for a few transactions and then, for a few weeks there are no more transactions, and the procedure has been forgotten. For one or two sporadic transactions it isn't clear who the best person to organise things is. These things need to be worked out and settle down into a regular system before an organisations is capable of managing big money. If you lurge forward too fast on one aspect of an organisation then it creates imbalances.
Temporal inequalities in the well sped society
Speed in one part of a system-whole, if it is too great, creates imbalance in another part. Interrelated systems, like convoys at sea, can only evolve as fast as the slowest part if they are not to pull apart. But societies are pulling apart - the gulf between rich and poor and their life styles is getting greater. Socially powerful groups have at their disposal immense reserves of power - here understood as physical energy. An immense accumulation of energy has been embodied or utilised in the construction of their cars, their jets, their computer telecommunications networks, their offices, factories and homes. An immense amount of energy is utilised (or converted) to operate these instruments of their social might. This gives these groups the advantage of speed. As Ivan Illych puts it powerful social groups have an energy guzzling "well-sped" life style. With speed they get more things sold (higher turnover), they produces things 'cheaper' (in money terms - the energy use is not cheap to the environment) and they get to the scenes of battles first and shoot quicker than their rivals.
The rest of us cannot keep up. Inequality has a variety of temporal dimensions. Synchronising one's life as a member of the underclass, with the time needs of our well sped betters, becomes more difficult and burdensome as they become more manic.
The well sped society wants people who will be flexible about their labour times. The worse jobs are not only worse in pay - they tend to be inferior in their temporal features. As a general rule people do not choose to do night shift work - they take on such work when their life circumstances leave them little other choice. A German study concludes "Shift work is not voluntary chosen. Coming to terms with the bad work conditions is necessary to survive. It is the material pressure to feed one's family, to pay off debts, to finance housing costs, or to save for a house, that forces people to accept the conditions of shift work" (Alheit P. Dausien B and Flörken-Erdbrink Leben in zwei Zeiten quoted in Kasten H. Wie die Zeit Vergeht. Primus Verlag Darmstadt 2001 p 150 My translation).
There is evidence that it is working women that find time pressures hardest of all to manage. A woman's work is never done. Womens' perceived double responsibility to their family, as well as to an employer, is further complicated when work times are required to be more flexible to suit the irregular needs of employers. This makes it difficult to co-ordinate with family and domestic commitments. When the opening and closing times of schools, childcare and other facilities do not match up together, it all gets very complicated. There is a continual struggle to make ad hoc arrangements with relatives and friends to collect the children from school. Low paid shop workers, who are mostly women, live in a continual "time dilemma" trying to relate work times to other key times, like when child care is available. Time planning becomes a major stress in its own right.
Even though one may be employed "part time", when that part-time is moved around to different times of the day and week it is even more difficult to establish a manageable routine. (I know from my own experience that working a three day week in a five day world is very difficult to manage satisfactorily. Full timers want to organise meetings on the days that I am supposed not to be working. By turning up on to meetings on those days, and then taking time off somewhere else in the week, I have a less than satisfactory arrangement. My "free time" ends up fragmented and unpredictable. I may have as much "quantitatively" but it is not as usable).
Time, unemployment and poverty
In the underclass what often happens is that people who cannot manage to synchronise their lives to keep up with the pace and routine (or flexible availability) required by the synchronisers of the economy end up with no activity at all. They end up with plenty of time - they end up unemployed.
Social psychologists have confirmed by research what, to many people, will be obvious: too much time pressure leads to stress but too little time pressure leads to boredom. ( Freedman, J and Edwards D "Time pressure, task performance and enjoyment" in J.E. McGarth The Social Psychology of Time New Perspectives Newbury Park, California 1988 - quoted in Levine). Psychological studies (again quoted in Levine) show that the most unhappy people of all are those who are under no time pressure at all. A psychologist called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi kept track of a number of people with a radio telephone and asked them repeatedly what they were doing and how they were feeling. Those who were occupied by a moderate amount of activity gave the most positive reports of their feelings, those who were trying to do several things at once were stressed. However those who were doing nothing at all, had no feeling of time flow and seldom reported that they felt well. This latter group were the most unhappy.
From this perspective the experience of unemployment is a psychological nightmare for many people. After, typically, they have spent their redundancy money redecorating the house, the problems for newly unemployed people begin to set in. Relationships with other family members are put under strain by the changed inter-personal time patterns. More time may be spent together with a spouse at home, for example, but with less to do together, so that friction occurs. Where repeated attempts to find a job fail, the unemployed person often loses a future horizon. It is typical too, of unemployed people to slip out of clock time into event time - they live when something is happening and/or when they can see other people. This is often the evenings. They start to get up late and go to bed late - living in a later cycle.
Time and Social Inclusion
Social inequality expresses itself not only in money but in time spent waiting. At the top of society people are waited on. They are waited on by their drivers, they are waited on at home and in hotels, in the office and in restaurants - so that time is easier to manage. A large part of the fragmented time in the underclass is spent in waiting for. The lower in the social hierarchy you are the more you wait for transport (for buses); in employment department, social security and housing benefit queues; at post office counters; in doctors surgeries and on waiting lists for operations (when one cannot pay for private treatment); in hospitals on mental health orders; in police cells, courts and in prisons. Socially excluded people are often spatially distant from the centres of power - something that has temporal implications. To get from your village or your part of the city by bus to visit a relevant government office may be a time commitment that you can ill afford. To get to a good supermarket selling cheap food may take too much time - so you buy in the more expensive corner shop with less choice. Thus, even though nothing much happens in the lives of socially excluded people - the time they live is still committed time and it is still a time that is hemmed in by constraints that reduce life quality.
Despite unemployment, or perhaps because of the lack of an imposed work time rhythm, socially disadvantaged people tend to pass their days fragmented in event-time - which is difficult for public and voluntary sector agencies to synchronise with.
".....when you do not pay people, when you do not tie them down in employment contracts, their involvement can be quite "crumbly" and sporadic. It can actually be quite difficult to tie down the days and times that you can actually come together to get things done. This is true for anyone involved as a volunteer, "disadvantaged" or not, because voluntary activities often compete with domestic commitments which people need to be flexible about outside of their working hours - the need to take children to a doctor, fitting in the shopping, putting up a visiting relative or friend. When you try to work with people who have a variety of social and economic problems voluntary commitment can be even more difficult to keep regular and consistent. Domestic relationships are likely to be stressed and motivation, morale and self confidence quite low. The ability to sustain a regular, patterned and dependable involvement.... will frequently crumble in the face of a mixture of personal financial crises, crises brought about by interviews with the employment or welfare services, disappointed hopes bringing about bouts of demobilising depression, illnesses or the illnesses of dependents and relatives, crises creating distractions, forgetfulness and hangovers, incidents in which people are the victims of crime and so on.
" In these circumstances what can then happen is that paid workers structure their time chasing after people whose involvement is irregular and haphazard in a way that is difficult to integrate with the need to organise regular meetings with other people in the office. In the case of one of the projects I am involved with we are trying to help disadvantaged people renovate their own homes in an eco-friendly way. We are to be monitored by our funders on how well we do this so the worker is under pressure to build up the numbers and fits in with when her clients have the will and ability to do the work. She juggles her days in order to do this - making it very difficult for her to organise jointly with other workers. The attempt to involve and connect to people whose lives are in chaos may feed back chaos into the organisation that is trying to help."
Desynchronised families
The temporal pattern of family and personal life is a topic in its own right. Luigi Boscolo and Paulo Bertrando call attention to the way in which family life has a crucial dimension in the creation and maintenance of the synchronisation of intimacy. (Luigi Boscolo and Paulo Bertrando. The Times of the Times. A New Perspective in Systemic Therapy and Consultation. WW Norton 1993.)
For people to be said to be in a relationship together they must be together, or in contact, regularly. But being together on its own is not enough. There must also be a synchronisation of the linguistic, behavioural, affective and cognitive features of their life for intimacy to be possible. Although people may be together, if what they are saying, doing, feeling and thinking is not matching up, then their relationships may be in trouble. It mum is continually exhausted at the time that dad is feeling sexually frisky, while, at the same time the children are wanting attention, then the family is likely to be rather unhappy. Boscolo and Bertrando call attention to the research of Minuchin and colleagues who studied slum families in New York. Their study showed that different families had widely different degrees of synchronisation and that non-synchronisation was often associated with family dysfunction.
A core aspect of Bertrando and Boscolo's understanding of relationships is the centrality of family "rituals". These are common regular events in family life which act as regulators that determine the flow of daily life and the recreation of the features of the family as a unit - its beliefs, its pleasures and its values. Of course many of these rituals take place through meals, but not only through them. Family rituals can be celebratory, enjoyable or serious- as for example birthday parties or wedding anniversary rituals, a regular weekly trip to the countryside, a visit to a club or the regular attendance of a church service. But rituals may also be negative - e.g. regularly picking on a family scapegoat at each meal.
Rituals can be constructed to be therapeutic. An example is of a family where a child had died and, after a time, a split had opened up between mother and remaining daughter about whether to continue mourning, or to 'get on with life'. Bertrando and Boscolo suggested to the split family that one day a week be set aside to remember the dead child, to talk about him, to visit his grave etc. On other days any thoughts about him were should be kept private. The negotiation of the difference in a weekly cycle and ritual worked very well to heal the family rift.
Time and Emotional and Mental Health
"We were confronted with a multiplicity of times: objective time and subjective time, family time, institutional time, cultural time. Our answer to the multiplicity of times was the idea that it would be important to co-ordinate the the different times, and that the inadequate co-ordination could be the origin of of problems, suffering and pathology." (Luigi Boscolo and Paulo Bertrando op. cit).
Our everyday use of language tells us how closely connected are our personal dealings with time, our personalities, our emotional states and the quality of our emotional relationships. We might say of someone that they are very 'patient' while thay are with someone who is being difficult. We mean that they are calm. If you are "impatient" with someone, it not only means that you are not prepared to wait, but that you are angry and tense. To be 'tired' of someone or something is to want to turn away from them.
Some times we are tired of people simply because we are tired. A survey of night shift workers found their relationships are more likely to break up and that they are more prone to be "cranky", moody and irritable. "Snapping or losing it",followed perhaps by tears, is a sympton of too much night work. Night shift workers are more sensitive to criticism and tend to see it as more undermining of their self esteem. They are prone to see problems that are not really there. Their attentiveness is impaired. (Leon Kreitzman, The 24 Hour Society pp 111- 112 ). In other contexts these "impatience" signals would be seen as classic symptons of psychiatric illness.
To "have no time" for someone means not to like them. It matters therefore, that, for example in the USA, studies show that parents spent 17 hours a week with their children in 1985 compared with 30 hours in 1965. (Quoted in turn by Will Hutton, "The State We are In" Vintage Books 1996 p 225.). If such children become narcissistic attention seekers in later life, their behaviour based on a craving for other people to notice that they are there (the "look at me, look at me" type of personality) then we may explain this partly in their parent's time priorisation. Some would say that if psychotherapy is effective it is, above all because, for once in life, someone is prepared to devote a whole hour listening once a week......
If a psychiatrist wants to know if you are perhaps going crazy they will ask if you know which day of the week it is. You can trust a psychiatrist to get social priorities right. Sanity, so it seems, is your orientation to the state of the working week. Interestingly, in a recent experiment reported on television, in which people tried living in an Iron Age lifestyle, the participants soon forgot which weekday it was. For a depressed person time is like a treadmill - the perceived chances for positive change in the future and therefore the energy to try to change anything fall away. Often what has happened in such a person's past has been interpreted by them into a pessimistic view of their future and they lose the energy of hope. The experience of a war, a death, illness, a breach of trust, a mistake colours how the present is interpreted and rigidifies the relationship between past, present and future. The person effect by the remembered event comes to doubt their own human agency to create their future. Their time horizon is therefore effected.
The time of a person who is suffering from what is called schizophrenia is even more lacking in structure. The anti-psychiatrist, Thomas Sszas, comments that to be mentally healthy "one must have a game to play in life". The aphorism suggests the problem for many people with severe mental health difficulties. One has to have something to get up for in the morning or "something to look forward to". Living in our society can be likened metaphorically to riding a bike. One will not stay upright and balanced unless one has forward movement - but that means one must have some point to which one is heading. In turn, that requires a confidence that one can be purposefully active in the world with other people. There must be a belief that this purposeful activity will be worthwhile. For most people the life game, the purpose of their social activity, that which gets them up and active, is earning money. They pursue purposes defined by their employer. Their pay funds the pursuit of other purposes like creating a home and bringing up children. For reasons not to be dwelt on here, but I suspect, often the result of over-regimentation in their childhood, the schizophrenic person has no confidence that they can create a future for themselves of this type. Without a future they live in a vectorless "now". Time not only has no flow for them, it has no structure either. The only certain future major event in their future is their forthcoming death. They may then live with the terror that they will die without having fully lived. It may be as if they had never existed.
Mania is another psychiatric time pathology. It takes the form of a life tempo that is exaggerated for an individuals social and interpersonal environment. I have suffered from manias myself. In mania the restless energy is an excitement that may derive from the belief that one's attention seeking for glory and recognition is about to be fulfilled if only one works that much harder and faster. One goes faster and faster. In the later stages of my manias I would rush round from place to place and leave personal possessions like umbrellas, jackets, keys or wallets behind. Needless to say, in order to retrieve myself from these mistakes I would have to return to where I had been, which meant I move around even faster. As I did so I would forget any organised plans for the day that I might have made. Mania is impulsive in that there is no gap between emotion, thought and action. Such is the excitement that one does not pause to think about the consequences of what one is doing. A non manic person considers whether not doing an intended thing might be a better option, or whether doing the intended thing at a later time would be more appropriate, or whether asking someone else to do it might be better. A non manic person also pauses to think about things after s/he has done them. My impulsive actions irritated and wound up other people.(For a self help approach to mania-busting see my web site ).
Type A Personalities and Heart Disease
Mania not the only form of "time pathology" recognised by doctors. (Ulmer D.K. and Schwartzbund, L. 1996. Treatment of Time Pathologies. In Allen R and Sheidt S. (eds) Heart and Mind. The practice of cardiac Psychology. Washington. American Psychological Association). Medical and psychological research suggests that there are other circumstances when one puts oneself under time pressure. Personal speed is can be noticed by how fast one eats, talks, walks, drives, how quickly one becomes impatient (in different kinds of situations), how often one has time problems with colleagues at work, how much one lives by the watch and calender.
There is an issue here about how far such behaviour is environmental - e.g. imposed by a job, and how far it is self imposed. Perhaps at some point particular forms of behaviour imposed from the outside (e.g. by a job) become so familiar, so taken for granted, that one does not notice the difference between the two. Certain jobs incline to speed under time pressure: for example trading on the financial markets or working in a newsroom. A person in these circumstances may find that speeding, self-pressured, behaviour develops a taken-for-granted, rightness feeling about it. When such people go home they are proud that they have kept themselves under pressure and look back on how much work they have processed. Later they die from heart attacks.
Psychotherapists describe some people as "compulsive neurotic". Often workaholics, they feel they must contruct the future to plan, and to performance standards. It reassures such people that they are in absolute control - of themselves, and of other people too, often enough. Were they to slow down, or stop working, they would be aware of a sense of panic, of emptiness. So they keep busy - and keep everyone else busy too. The people who put themselves under time pressure to compete against, and outperform, other people, those competitive types who often get angry and impatient with the slower performance of others - these are the people that psychologists call the so called Type A personality - who are far more susceptible to heart disease. They kill themselves.
The Case of Japan
It should be stressed however that the relationship does not seem to be as simple as speed = risk of heart attacks. The pace of work in Japan is one of the fastest in the world, perhaps the fastest in the world. But the rate of heart disease has not been correspondingly high - even when one allows for the fact that the Japanese have a different diet, heart disease has been surprisingly low. The reason, suggested by social psychologists, is that speed at the Japanese workplace is not combined with interpersonal competitiveness and hostility. The Japanese economy is organised in, and through, very different kinds of social relationships. Individuals think of themselves as members of the company rather than workers. As a result the Japanese have a collective work ethic based on the notion of duty to the group. Individual (male) workers get support from the work group which is a long term emotional network with a significance on a par with their family. In the post war period most workers have been employed for life and this fosters long term identification employers and the work group. The fast pace of work is not therefore experienced, in the same way as in other capitalist economies, combined with anger and impatience. However, things are changing as the Japanese economy has got in difficulties. As economic insecurity in Japan has emerged, so too has what the Japanese call Karoshi - death through overwork.
Corporate Manias
A psychiatrist looking at a case of someone suffering what s/he would call manic depression may think that tempo irregularities are problems only for individuals. However we can now see that tempo is not a purely individual matter. Tempo is a group phenomenon - it is a matter for organisations, cities and the wider society.
Corporations may get their business tempos wrong . Even in the market you can go too fast. At the time I was writing this there was a news report about a Rolls Royce car in the USA blowing up and cars of this model being recalled. This is not an isolated example. Karlheinz A Geißler, in one of his books ( Vom Tempo der Welt, Herder Verlag, Freiburg, 1999) calls attention to statistics from an insurance company. World wide, between 1994 and 1997, there were 397 cases in which motor companies had to call back models of their cars to deal with design and production faults not discovered because the cars were released, in a hurry, before they had been properly tested.
Collective life tempos in fact show huge cultural differences. As a generalisation social psychological studies have shown that the pace of life is much faster in industrialised countries rather than agrarian ones, in rapidly developing economies rather than in depressed economies, in urban areas rather than rural ones, in areas of high population density rather than low population density, in cold or temperate societies rather than hot or tropical ones, in competitive and individualistic societies rather than collectively orientated ones.
Measuring the pace of life - fast and slow cities and countries
Of course, if depends how you measure. The social psychologist Robert Levine, in his book, A Geography of Time, measured the pace of life in 31 countries on three indicators - the pace of walking by pedestrians, the speed of service in the purchase of a postage stamp and the accuracy of clocks on bank buildings compared to time in the telephone system. With these measures the Swiss come out as fastest country followed, perhaps surprisingly, by Ireland. (Perhaps the pace of walking is effected if it is cold and wet). Then followed, in this order - Germany, Japan, Italy, England, Sweden....at the bottom of the list, the slowest coutries, were El Salvador, Brasil, Indonesia. Slowest of all was Mexico. Levine admits that his three indicators, as with any choice of yardsticks, may not be the best. However, they give broad orders of magnitude. They serve well enough to illustrate the general issues.
Applying slightly different indicators Levne also measured the pace of life in different cities in the USA .(The USA was 16th in his 31 country ranking). The measuring rods for the cities were (as before) speed of walking but also how long it took to get change for a 20 dollar note at a bank counter, speaking speed (the words per minute spoken in answer to a standard question by a post office worker recorded on an unseen tape ). Finally, he measured the number of men and women from a random sample carrying watches. Once again Levine discovered great variations. The fastest cities were Boston, Buffalo and New York (in general, cities in the north east ). The slowest cities were Sacramento and Los Angeles in California.
Levine also investigated whether the speed of life in the different cities was related to people's helpfulness to each other. By a series of experiments it was possible to measure general helpfulness of the population in different cities. (e.g. noting how many people picked up and returned an apparently accidentally dropped pen, or measuring the number of people who would help someone with a bandaged leg struggling to pick something up). There was indeed a tendency for the faster cities to be less helpful - though this connection did not always hold true. The slow Californian cities were laid back but also more unhelpful. People in some of the faster cities, where the social structure was more "traditional" and stable were more prepared to lend a helping hand. In general this is as one would expect. It is not having the time alone that explains why people might be more helpful - there has to be a social ethic in a place based in a stable local culture. However, when people are under time pressure this certainly discourages helpfulness.
The Case of New York
The fast tempo of New York City went hand in hand with its status of the most unhelpful of all US cities. Perhaps this is connected to New York's status as financial centre - which infects the culture and collective psychology of the city, Another author describes the place thus "In New York city.... people feel that they themselves are capital, which must for ever seek its most remunerative employment; and that there is an opportunity cost - income forgone - in bidding you Good Day" ( James Buchan, Frozen Desire. An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money. Picador, London 1998.) If a 'time is money social psychology' thoroughly dominates a place, the average person is no more going to give their time to people with bandaged legs than they are going to give their money to street beggars. Nor are they going waste their time for anything as trivial as social contact if it isn't going to earn them a buck. Moreover, in this kind of place, the people who cannot make money feel inclined to get it by robbery instead - so that the fear of street crime speeds up yet further the speed of walking on the street.
Although derived from a series of experiments on the streets Robert Levine's findings raise questions for social and community health more generally. There has been much interest in recent years in the idea of "social capital". This basically means that if people live with helpful and supportive social networks their life quality and health is much better. (How typical it is that American academics should describe social networks using economic terminolgy, as as if social relationships were assets!). It is generally accepted that community development, the fostering of self help and mutual aid networks, is important. Community development means people are prepared to give time to each other and take the time for each other. As I have already suggested when you are under time pressure you are less likely to "have the time" for others. In hurried time environments people may be less prepared to help each other - and it is simply more and more difficult to create the space in hurried environments for community activity. This is even more the case now that our betters are showing signs of wanting to rip off people's generosity with their time. Much voluntary activity is discretionary and voluntary, made in people's own time. People do this voluntary activity for a variety of activities but they are not paid for it and that makes it gifted labour. Most grants to voluntary sector organisations and groups go to pay the expenses, office costs, support costs for paid support workers, but, nonetheless, there is a huge add-on of gifted time that is thereby made possible. Now, however, governments want to start measuring this activity up, and to demand 'continuous improvement' of 'performance' in voluntary time. Their agenda is that voluntary social services are cheaper than ones funded out the taxes on the wealthy - this is an indirect exploitation of people's altruism on behalf of greed. Even in our volunteered time the money interests put us under time pressure.
Slow Food and Fast Food
Lunch breaks too are under pressure. Once upon a time people had proper lunch breaks. My father, a public health inspector, came home for his lunch. Nowadays we have sandwiches at our desks or grab a 90 second burger on the way between meetings. However, this means a loss of business for restaurants. The idea for slower cities partly originated in a Slow Food Movement in Italy.
Fast food and convenience food are a product of the modern technologies of refrigerated storage and refrigerated transport - as well as the mass production of food. Their development was closely tied into the development of places to eat, while underway, often in a hurry, in an car based society. The development of fast food parallels the disintegration of the practice of eating together at synchronised common meal times. In recent research from the USA 75% of American families do not eat breakfast together. The number of meals eaten together each week is three or less - and the meals last no longer than 20 minutes on average. On the other hand an average middle class person has almost 20 individual contacts with the fridge. This desocialisation of eating ("eat and run" or "grazing" approach to food ) has consequences. Eating becomes an activity done secondary to something else - while walking, driving, watching the television. The preparation of food and meals therefore loses significance as a source of local identity. A locally distinctive cuisine is no longer prepared with local skills based on a knowledge of locally available foodstuffs when they are in season. The local knowledge of pickling or other preservation techniques for out of harvest time consumption is also lost. The connection between local eating and local natural rhythms - is lost. Every city centre is the same - there's a McDonalds there. The fast food places are fed by factory farming from distance suppliers, supplying a product that is available anywhere in the world in the same form.
Eating Shit - American style
The consequences, as a recent book has shown, are a series of losses - not the least of which is in food hygiene. Eric Schlosser writes "Every day in the United States, roughly 200,000 people are sickened by a food borne disease, 900 are hospitalised and 14 die. According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention more than a quarter of the American population sufers a bout of food poisoning each year. Most of these cases are never reported to the authorities or diagnosed." (quoted in the London Guardian weekend supplement (7th April 2001)from the book, "Fast Food Nation. What the All-American Meal is doing to the World" Alan Lane The Penguin Press, 2001).
One reason for this massive amount of food poisoning is to be found in a 1996 USDA study. It investigated ground beef samples taken in the 13 or so giant packing houses that now slaughter most of US beef for the fast food industry. 78.6% of the beef contained microbes that are spread primarily by fecal material. "The medical literature on the causes of food poisoining is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms :coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: there is shit in the meat".
Behind the fact that Americans eat shit is yet another simple fact - the speed of the slaughter process carried out by unskilled largely illiterate workers. Manure, stomach contents and intestines can spill around everywhere when hurried workers make a mistake. "The increased speed of today's production lines makes the task much more difficult - and the consequences of single error are quickly multiplied as hundreds of carcasses quickly move down the line. Knives are supposed to be cleaned and disinfected every few minutes. A contaminated knife spreads germs to everything it touches..."
Human time imposed on animal and natural time
Fast food is not only prepared and eaten fast. It is fast because the animals whose flesh are used live short lives. Nothing more tellingly expresses the imposition of money time over natural time than the time taken to rear food animals to slaughter. Barbara Adam, in her book, Timescapes of Modernity (1999) writes: "In 1800 it took 2 to 5 years for a pig to reach a slaughter weight of 60kg. By the beginning of this century (1900) it took only 11 months for a pig to reach a weight of 100kg. Today the same weight is reached before the pig is half a year old: ready for slaughter before it has lost its baby teeth." (p 142). The time regime of industrialised milking is equally significant. North European cows are mostly exhaused after about 5 years during which they endure an intensive of repeated pregnancy and lactation. This is a mere quarter of an average potential lifetime. In the USA the period is down to 2.2 years and in Israel 1.8 years. (For comparison, the record in a dairy economy geared to lifetime productivity, is held by an Irish cow that reached 48 years and gave birth to 39 calves.) The time regime also has different daily rhythm to what would be the natural one. Whereas calves left with their mothers would suckle about ten times a day, milking mostly happens twice a day. When the calves themselves are fed it tends to be on a twice daily schedule. This can adequately cover their nutritional requirements but leaves them with a shortfall in suckling and comfort, a deficit that tends to materialise in the form of behavioural abnormalities, stress and reduced resistance to illness. (p140)
Of course, not all research for the supermarket economy is devoted to speeding things up. Extending shelf life involves slowing down the decay of products. A potato's way of saying that it is beginning to decay is to sprout. But not if you treat it with Tecnazene, a toxic fungicide, that inhibits sprouting. A number of preservatives have e numbers which would have to be included on the ingredients list of other food products but fruit and vegetables are mysteriously exempt from these labelling requirements. In previous centuries people knew how fresh "fresh" vegetables were. Not any more. The manipulation of the time frame of "freshness", and the chemicals used to maintain "freshness", remains invisible to consumers.
Timescapes and Environmental Damage
It is a major part of the argument of Barbara Adam that environmentally significant timescapes remain hidden in this way. Most people are unaware of long term processes of environmental change and damage. Problems commonly manifest themselves after long "latency" periods in which, analogous to illnesses, the damage is taking hold, out of sight, a long time before visible"symptons" occur. These initially invisible processes are not reversible. In everyday life people work with a time consciousness where time is hoped to have a "reversible character" - they live in the hope that "things will return to normal", to the old routine and pattern. But environmental damage is often not like that. When the Chernobyl disaster occurred it was only possible to be aware that there was a problem in Wales and Cumbria through radiation measurement - the radiation hazard was invisible without technical measurement. People hoped that the invisible threat might be washed into the soil to a depth where it would no longer constitute surface contamination, thus "returning to normal". Many have lost this illusion. They have had to come to terms with the idea that their land, their animals, their bodies - and the bodies of their children and of their children's children...are irreversibly transformed.
When environmental and health problems do emerge it is often difficult, because they are distant in time and place from the original sources and causes, to work out just what is causing them. In Asia it took 15 years to work out that the refinement of rice, which took out key minerals and vitamins, was causing Beriberi, a disease that attacks the heart, nervous and digestive system. At the late stages of the evolution of problems it can be too late to reverse the causes and extensive damage. Often it is not possible to know at all what is causing a problem.
Here lies the case for general application of a precautionary principle which would mean to stop the headlong dynamic of many current processes whose toxic and other effects cannot be predicted. But that clashes with powerful economic interests. Moreover our collective awareness of the problems is not well served by the news media. It has its own timescape. Pride of place in news coverage is given to topical issues - rather than to long term extensive processes. Priority is given to "real time reporting". The faster the better - and newsflashes with an instantaneous as it is happening content are best of all. Environmental matters that develop in the long term do not command the same sense of urgency. They are used in the media as 'filler items' for the days there is nothing more timely or pertinent to report.
It is no surprise in this context that governments, responding to media-articulated public opinion, and who are themselves elected for 4 to 5 years, and not with a longer term mandate, give these issues a low priority. It is far more important to governments, overawed by big money interests, to give way to developments which appear to promise short term employment gains, pushing the application of the latest scientific and technological developments and turning a blind eye to precautionary principles.
Governments, of course, like to convey an idea that the risks can be managed - by business, science and the authorities working together. Their ideology of manageability is based on a set of assumptions - that causal connections across time and space can be known and are visible, that causes and effects are proportional (i.e. small causes have small effects), that measurement, quantification and control are possible. Yet, as we know from the foot and mouth crisis - a small effect can produce a big chain reaction that extends across space and time. As Adam shows, attempts to understand, manage and control the long term environmental consequences of economic actions with scientific methodologies developed in laboratory conditions are flawed. In laboratory conditions there is an ability to control conditions. Experimental science can produce results which are specific, desired and predictable. However, in the environment things are different. No one knows, or could know, the non-reversible, networked, discontinuous and non proportional effects over time - e.g. the effects of releasing genetically engineering material in "field trials." She quotes Joanna Blythman's book, The Food We Eat (London: Michael Joseph publishers 1996) to the effect that "The history of agrichemicals is littered with toxic substances that were considered safe and then subsequently withdrawn long after doubts had been raised abut their safety." Adam suggests that the consequence of time policies in food are that "locally grown, seasonal, genuinely fresh and non processed food ought to become a basic citizen right which supermarkets and other retail outlets are legally bound to supply" (p 157)
Time Policy and Time Politics
Time politics are not a new thing. For over a century the length of the working week has pre-occupied trade unions and governments. In general the trend in regard to the official working week in industrial countries has been downwards. However, looking at the official hours no longer tells the full story. For example, in the public sector more and more responsibilities and tasks are loaded upon teachers, social workers and other officials, performance standards are jacked up, but there is no extra time to do these things. In the long term extra time in these services would require more resources for more trained workers - but that would require more taxes or public borrowing, and that would never do. Our betters cannot allow such inefficiency. So the intensity of work "at work" increases and increasingly people take work home. Even when they are not pouring over paperwork at home they are thinking about their jobs. In the information age, thinking and planning is part of the job. For some people this is what keeps them from falling asleep and wakes them up early in the morning. They end up working in bed or thinking about work while with partners, with friends or children, who only get half of their attention. They are pre-occupied, of course, not just by the work itself - but also by the ever increasing complexity of synchronising it, of fitting it in with child care, family and other commitments.
The starting point of social time politics is the idea of time welfare. Welfare is not only to be considered in income and material possessions but also in the ability to fashion, to shape, to arrange one's own time to one's own needs. It means to set one's own rhythms of everyday life. To be in control of one's own time has individual, inter-personal and social dimensions. Different people have different degrees of freedom in the extent to which they can arrange their time to suit themselves because they are, in different degrees, dependent on the time structures of the natural, social and economic world in which they live. The times of their work, of their children's school, the times of their spouses work, the times needed to travel on routine journeys, the transport means at their disposal, the ability to pay for others to fetch and carry for them or to look after their children, the need to work long hours to make ends meet set the time structure of people's lives. All of these vary the degrees of freedom that we have to structure our time for ourselves. In order to change the rhythms of our lives and arrange a time structure that suits us as individuals we need both to change our internal habits and orientation and also effect a change in these external time parameters. Major changes can rarely be made overnight as, to change our time pattern entails a knock on re-organisation of the whole interacting pattern of our income, work, relationships and habitats, as well as the movements between the locations in which these take place. A person who decides to work part time, rather than full time, will sacrifice income and this is likely to require other adjustments in their lives. It is only usually when the grosser, external parameters are changed, that we can begin to change the more subtle psychological and behavioural features of our time consciousness - like taking more time to talk to people we meet in the street and listening to what they have to say, like taking the time to contemplate aspects of our lives without being pre-occupied by a pressing list of work tasks still to be done.
While "time sovereignty" is a thing for individuals to work on, much can and must also be done collectively, in the political arena and, when it involves our work places, through collective negotiations with employers, through our trade unions. Time arrangements are, by their very nature, arrangements between people - usually people living in close proximity to each other. Time management is therefore a proper subject for urban policy. This has been furthest developed in Italy where the Italian women's movement have, for over a decade being working to relieve the time pressure on women and found their agenda taken up by the trade unions and other interest groups. A large number of Italian cities now have time policies, including Milan, Genoa, Rome, Florence, Venice, Pisa and Bologna.
Time policy has also been taken up in Germany an Austria where the Tutzing Time Ecological Project considers time policy from an ecological perspective. The University of Klagenfurth is closely involved with another network called the Verein zur Verzögerung der Zeit (Association for the Deceleration of Time) which helps its members find the right tempo for themselves and studies time as a social, cultural and political phenomenon.
Urban Time Policy
In a collection of essays on urban time policy published in Germany we can read that the main aims of the Italian urban time policies are: (1) to improve the relationship between occupational time and time for domestic and family labour; (2) to increase the possibilities for individuals to arrange their time structures in different ways and thus increase the usefulness of urban resources for inhabitants and improve their life quality; (3) to promote and improve opportunities for the involvement of all family members in domestic and family labour (an equal opportunities agenda for men and women); (4) the consideration and support of natural times and rhythms (biological rhythms like the natural rest phase at night, cosmological times like day and night, winter and summer); (5) consideration and support for traditional times for cities (the order of events for family and social life); (6) the promotion of the transition from standardised worktimes for work times flexible to the needs of the individual; (7) to offer city users (commuters, tourists, business visitors) hospitality in a way which considers their different time needs from permanent city inhabitants; (8) upgrading and reviving peripheral streets and squares through traded activities (including changing open hours): (9) to commit public and private services to meet two different time requirements - those of their users and those of their staff - the latter of which also require services ( equal treatment for all citizens); (10) strengthening the effectiveness of public administrations by public opening and availability at hours needed by citizens; (11) to connect time policies to the different needs of citizens at different ages of their lives. (From der Zeitpläne der Stadt Bozen in Ulrich Mückenberger (ed.) in the essay collection "Zeiten der Stadt", Editionen Themen, Bremen 2000 )
The time initiatives in pursuit of these aims include - (1) spatial use: investigation of time pressures and time wasting through surveys and simulations of everyday journeys; altering spatial planning and zoning with a view to reduce mobility needs - organising work, home and leisure near to each other, simplifying bureaucracy, reducing supply distances btween centres and peripheries. (2) Transport system - desynchronising, reduction of travel and waiting times through public transport, timetables, dragging out the rush hour times. (3) Opening times - improvement and co-ordination of opening times in kindergardens, schools, youth facilities, doctors surgeries, care centres, libraries, restaurants, parking facilities, public toilets, shops etc.
This agenda of Italian urban time politics has long since found its way into Germany. In both Germany and Italy the political philosophy underlying time politics is one of citizen participation and negotiation between all those affected. It is conceived as a bottom upwards process because, while space can be either yours or mine, it is in the nature of social time that it is a common property. The book I have just cited, edited by Mückenberger, the German director of the EUREXCTER project, shows a host of examples from across Europe, including also from Finland, France and the Netherlands where time politics has been taken up in various ways in the a new style of politics, by a host of interest and community groups.In Hamburg, Bremen and Hannover the local governments have time offices whose job it is to improve time relationships in their respective towns. The German towns have participated in the European programme EUREXCTER in a programme around time and the quality of urban life.
In Italy, for example, these developments have linked up with the slow food movement - allowing time for lunch breaks and taking up issues to do with environmental sustainability within a policy framework that has led to the creation of the Italian slow cities movement.
24 Hour Cities - and 24 Hour Societies
Many of these kinds of policies are also to be found, on a case by case basis in UK cities. There is indeed, an association for 24 hour cities. Nottingham is a member. (I am grateful to Jane Ellis, City Centre Manager of Nottingham City Council for sending me details of Nottingham's 24 Hour Policy which dates back a number of years). However, the twenty four hour city movement in the UK seems to have arisen and developed in a somewhat different way. It is partly about CCTV city centre surveillance through the night (for crime is often a night problem). It has also apparently emerged out of economic interests pressing for increased employment through the development of an evening, and then a late night, economy. This is initially, at least, a strategy for the cultural, leisure, night club and restaurant sector in town centres. It is seen as a way, not only of making cities more lively, but of making them more competitive. The idea here is that attractive cities are those that attract inward investment. Inward investment is not only about money it is about staff. When you invest in a town a question for management and senior staff who will live there is: will it be a good place to live? Will it offer a good quality of life? It is believed that a lively nightlife will be seen as a plus.
The promoters of the 24 hour city, seem, in short, to have a primarily economic agenda. The limited agenda may appear beneficial but it raises issues that need more consideration. They can be seen as the advance guard, the Trojan Horse even, of those who want to introduce a much bigger agenda - that of the "24 hour society" into the social and economic mainstream. When Leon Kreitzman discusses the 24 hour city in his book it is part of the larger agenda for this 24 Hour Society. To read Kreitzman's book is to become aware that the issue is not just about night clubs and closing hours - the deeper agenda is about which businesses are fast enough, and which are too slow, in the competitive economy. The faster companies work through the night - so they have an edge. Kreitzmann's key examples are the Kinko chain of round the clock business support services bought up by Richard Branson's Virgin Group.. Or the First Direct Bank, contactable through the whole night. Or Tesco who open 63 of their 588 stores all night Monday to Friday. Around the world the number of people working at night is increasing. In the USA it is 20 million people. This is the direction we are heading.
Because the 24 hour city is all about a lively night life, about partying and night clubs, Kreitzmann accuses those who question the 24 Hour Society plans of being kill-joys, of puritanism, of not giving the consumer public what they want. However a fairer picture is created by considering Italian urban time politics. When we look at the way the Italian cities have taken up time politics we can see that the key thing is whether the time policy agenda will be mainly driven by commercial interests or if it will become agenda for everyone in civil society. To involve everyone requires more than a one off debate - it requires a permanent process of investigation, negotiation, and the representation of all stake holders. It requires that the interests of socially excluded people are recognised and steps are taken to try to help them find their own place, to develop their own organisation and initiatives in this new political process. It requires too that that the deeper rhythms of ecology are brought back into the perspective. Far from being kill joys the Italians, Germans and other Europeans are taking citizen rights seriously, investigating all the issues, creating citizens forums and discussions so that the agenda becomes properly a part of civil society - not simply conceded it to business and commercial interests to take the lead.
As we have seen, the economic agenda is the very starting point of the problem if it does not take into account the wider picture - the health needs of people given their circadian rhythms, environmental considerations, problems of social synchronisation when you work at night but everyone else lives in the day. When we read Kreitzmanns book a very worrying picture develops. The book is full of details about the health effects of working and living outside natural and circadian rhythms (though it says virtually nothing about ecological time). It tells us, for example, that night shift workers suffer higher levels of indigestion, ulcers, diabetes and ischaemic heart disease. Going without sleep for 28 hours has an effect on work performance similar to double the UK drink drive limit. Long term shift workers have an increase in cardiovascular mortality equivalent to smoking 20 cigarettes a day. And yet Kreitzman, who has previously been hired by First Direct and British Telecom to research the 24 hour phenomenon, is still keen to promote the 24 hour society in contradiction to his own evidence. He styles himself the champion of the consumer and of the hard pressed working woman and he advocates opening up the time resources "available" in the night as their salvation. It is all rather reminiscent of the alcoholic whose solution to withdrawal symptons is yet another drink or of the manic person who believes if he speeds up yet more, gets up even earlier to go to work, then all will be achieved and all will be well. There is a crisis - more of the same will cure it. So Kreitzmann's book is also full of advice on how best to manage night work - advice which some would say is not going to be easy for many people to arrange. As always with these kind of prophets Kreitzmann offers technological fixes too - in the short term, there are lighting systems at work. By varying the luminosity these systems help adjust your circadian rhythms for you (though not your social and sexual life). And....promises, promises..."in less than 30 years time" scientists, currently beavering away investigating the circadian rhythms and the genetic structure of the fruit fly, will be able to apply their knowledge to humans. Thus it is "probable" that "we will have the capacity to design our own cycles for a given set of needs." (Our needs doubtless corresponding to the needs of British Telecoms or First Direct.) We will be able to programme ourselves to be attentive at that point in the day just when our employers most need us to be attentive. "The programming would be done by setting a wrist watch that also serves to deliver a cocktail of chemicals through the skin and into the blood at specific intervals." (p 104).
Welcome to the machine!
Brian Davey
April- May 2001
Postscript: According to my computer I have been sitting at the keyboard for 34 hours and 52 minutes writing this. The research has taken place much longer. I am especially grateful to my friend Doris Buhß whose interest in this subject predated mine by several years and whose book collection started me off. She it was who put me up while researching the topic in Germany. Any errors and mistakes are, of course, mine.
© BRIAN DAVEY