A. About Time

Anthony Abbott (2001) Time Matters: On Theory and Method Chicago: Chicago University Press.
This collection of Abbott’s work showcases his evolving thinking on broad matters of theory and method, including linearity, causality, case methods, events, turning points and boundaries. These certainly all have a time component, although ‘time itself’ has to be searched for in his wider argument. However, Chapter 8 on ‘Temporality and process in social life’ centres on the relationship between ‘past’ and ‘present’, exploring this by discussing an invention in the whaling trade in relation to Bergson’s Time and Free Will, Mead’s Philosophy of the Present and Whitehead’s Process and Reality. While the example is sometimes distracting, the discussion of past and present in these three books is very helpful. Abbott is also concerned with events in relation to time and this aspect is discussed in the ‘Events’ reading list.

Barbara Adam (1990) Time & Social Theory Cambridge: Polity Press.
The inaugurating book in Adam’s extremely influential work in theorising time and temporalizing social theory within a sociological frame.

Barbara Adam (1995) Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time Cambridge: Polity Press.
Here Adam turns her attention from social theory to explore the embedded of time in social interactions, structures and practices and changes in these over time.

Barbara Adam (1998) Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards London: Routledge.
This book explores the relationship between time and the environment and the particular time heralded by environmental change as a unique ‘timescape’.

Barbara Adam (2004) Time Cambridge: Polity Press.
More of a textbook than her other books, Adam’s Time explores and overviews questions about the nature of time, how it’s conceptualized, how it’s experienced, the parameters set by nature and attempts to transcend these.

Barbara Adam & Chris Groves (2007) Future Matters; Action, Knowledge, Ethics Leiden: Brill.
This book is concerned with how, and by whom, the future is created and known. In a context in which change is seen as occurring in an accelerated way and people are immersed in the many demands of the present, ‘the future’, or rather futures are prefigured and being created, also in an accelerated way.

**Barbara Adam’s four books above are important, indeed essential, reading for sociologists interested in time and temporality, as is the world-leading journal she founded, Time & Society.

Barbara Adam (2009) ‘Cultural future matters: an exploration in the spirit of Max Weber’s methodological writings’ Time & Society 18, 7025.
Futures, Adam comments, are created continuously in every second of the day, produced by social institutions of different kinds and at all levels of social interaction. Using various implicit future orientations in the work of Max Weber, she focuses on the temple domain of the ‘not yet’ and how futures are conceived and enacted in context. Futurity, she comments, is both process and product.

Stuart Allan (1994) ‘When discourse is torn from time: Bakhtin and the principle of chronotopicity’ Time & Society 3, 193-218.
‘Time takes on flesh’ (100-208), with Allan exploring three types of time – adventure, everyday, biographical. He is also concerned with ‘chronotopicity’ and how time is materialised in space (208-11). In discussing this, he explore issues regarding texts of different kinds, concerning dialogical ‘truth’, silences about power and resistance, how texts appeal to everyday views and their truth claims are made natural, how they are interpreted and negotiated, the power to define space/time and reflexivity concerning this. Useful for thinking about time and texts of all kinds.

Werner Bergmann (1992) ‘The problem of time in Sociology: an overview of the literature on the state of theory and research on the sociology of time’, 1900-82’ Time & Society 1, 81-134.
As the title says, this is an overview of the literature on time produced in sociology up to 1982. There are some interesting comments concerning the future, and time reckoning in timetables and other forms of temporal organisation.

Deidre Boden (1997) ‘Temporal frames: time and talk in organizations’ Time & Society 5, 5-33.
Boden’s concern here is with doing time, producing its organisation. She interestingly discusses temporal frames – shared meanings and structures that organise by facilitating schedules, deadlines and so on (27). Time, she also suggests, is inherently episodic and organisations are a ‘vast time-space matrix’ (28), while ‘the dust of history’ is formed by the linked residue of little facts, forming a chain across duration.

Geoffrey Bowker (1995) ‘Second nature once removed: time, space and representations’ Time & Society 4, 47-66.
Bowker is concerned with how technologies have impacted on the representation of time and space – the factory, the railway, and the grain elevator were all involved in reworking time and space.  Different technologies produce different representations of the world and how it works, with railways having been particularly important in this. However, rather than the usual assumption of speed and progress, Bowker points out the representational time involved has included the static and featureless rather than being hegemonic.

John Boyd and Phillip Zimbardo (1997) ‘Constructing time after death: the transcendental-future time perspective’ Time & Society 6, 35-54.
An interesting discussion concerned with how ‘time after death’ is conceived. The mundane future is the pre-death time frame, while transcendental time governs perceptions of the future after death – continuous, enduring, infinite, subject to different laws/rules.  Interesting to think with, for both forms of temporal thinking can perhaps be seen as existing regarding pre-death time.

**David Carr (1991) Time, Narrative and History Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press.
An extremely influential book that looks beyond historiography and the presentational work of history writing, beyond the professionally authorised research practices of discovery, evaluation of sources, interpretation and explanation, and beyond claims and debates concerning both. Its focus is rather upon the fact that ‘historical experience’ precedes both and is something which everyone experiences: people are beings not only ‘in time’ but also this brings with it knowledge about the relationship of (conceptions of) the past in relation to the present. Narration, Carr relatedly proposes, is part and parcel of this, rather than a ‘literary’ form. Interesting and important reading.

**Penelope J. Corfield (2007) Time and the Shape of History New Haven: Yale University Press.
Centrally concerned with how ‘history’ is shaped as a means of making sense of the past, long-term time, and thereby understanding the unfolding of events and change. From the starting point that synchronicity is always in the diachronic, that every short-term moment contributes to a much longer-term, it explores a range of diachronic/synchronic perspectives under the sign of the term diachromesh. Important reading.

Michael Corsten (1999) ‘The time of generations’ Time & Society 8, 249-72.
For Corsten, using Mannheim’s ideas about generations, a generation produces a collective identity involving overlapping social circles and personal networks. He suggests that historical time, historical semantics and cultural circles are helpful in thinking about the endogenous time of a generation.

Tim Cresswell (2004) Place: A Short Introduction Oxford: Blackwell.
A brisk reminder that time always has place, with this short book providing an excellent guide to the literature.

Geoffrey Cubitt (2007) History and Memory Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Overviews debates and theories about the relationship between memory, history and the past.

Mark Currie (2007) About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Drawing on ideas about narrative and fictionality, Currie discusses the present, prolepsis (a ‘flash forward’ to future times), temporality, inner and outer time, backwards time, fictional times and tense times. The chapters on prolepsis and backwards time are particularly interesting.

**Norbert Elias (1991) Time: An Essay London: Routledge.
The entirely of Elias’s work is concerned with time, temporality and social change. The Civilizing Process and The Germans, for instance, explore the complex backwards and forwards changes which societies deem to be ‘civilizing’; and the twin ideas of sociogenesis and figuration running through his oeuvre offering subtle and interesting ways of thinking about how change occurs in that complex interface between the quotidian and social structures and forces. His (long) essay, Time, works from his thinking about sociogenesis/process to propose that the very ability to conceive of ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ is grounded in the historically emergent circumstances of social life and people’s reflexive engagement with things happening and people behaving. More abstractly, he sees time as ‘arising’ out of how people link separate sequences of changes in behaviours or events in a ‘first this then that’ way.

**Johannes Fabian (1991) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object New York: Columbia University Press.
An important and much referenced book. As Fabian puts it, ‘Formulated as a question, the topic of these essays was, How has anthropology been constructing or defining its object – the Other? Search for an answer has been guided by a thesis: Anthropology emerged and established itself as an allocentric discourse; it is the science of other men in another Time. It is a discourse whose referent has been removed from the present of the speaking/writing subject.’ (143) and contra this, ‘As I see it now, the anthropologist and his interlocutors only “know” when they meet each other in one and the same contemporality’ (164); the removal of the ‘Other’ he also calls a conjuring trick. But as he points out, while ‘they’ and ‘we’ are coevals for much anthropology [and sociology], this is not so regarding studies of the past. And so while ‘we’ use time in a central (if often unacknowledged) way in our constructions of ‘them’ and the ‘then’ they inhabited, there is actually no easy answer in the form of acknowledging coevalness available. Read on!

**Michael G. Flaherty (2011) The Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal Experience Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Particularly concerned with the everyday management of time and based on extensive interviewing, Flaherty also provides an insightful discussion of duration, frequency, sequence, timing, allocation and temporal agency. Important reading.

Michael G. Flaherty and Gary Fine (2001) ‘Past, present and future: conjugating George Herbert Mead’s perspective on time’ Time & Society 10, 147-61.
Flaherty & Fine point out that time is central to Mead’s version of symbolic interactionism: for him, people live in the present, and their intrpretations and practices regarding the past and the future and shaped by the present. A very useful overview of Mead’s thinking on time and temporality.

Bernhard Giesen (2004) ‘Noncontemporaneity, asynchronicity and divided memories’ Time & Society 13, 27-40.
Three different kinds of temporal inconsistencies are discussed by Giesen – noncontemporaneity (coexistence in time of things from and of other times), asynchronicity (the different rhythms of different institutional or social domains) and divided memories (different views of the ‘same’ events). He is in particular concerned with the notion of collected memory, but these ideas about temporal inconsistences stand alone.

Dave Horton (2005) Book Review: Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Time & Society 14, 157-9
A useful review of Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis which sensibly points out that Lefebvre’s approach combines time as much as space and emphasises they need to be thought of together. Herton also helpfully notes that rhythms are about ‘repetition, yet repetition produces difference’ (158).

Jordynn Jack (2006) ‘Chronotopes: Forms of time in rhetorical arguments’ College English 69, 52-73.
Bakhtin’s ideas about the chronotope are annually butchered in many pieces of academic writing. Jack provides an overview of three useful ways of viewing the chronotope: how a text utilises particular arrangements of space and time, a topos; the embedding within a chonotope of material realities of people, places and actions; and that chronotopes bear with them epistemological implications, not least that they co-exist and are mutually interwoven.

K.M. Jaszczolt (2009) Representing Time: An Essay on Temporality as Modality Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coming at the puzzles and paradoxes of time via the philosophy of language, Representing Time is interested in cultural organisations of time and  proposes that people represent the past, present and future in terms of epistemic modalities. Tackles the representational issue head on and provides a detailed (rather than purely abstract) as well as theoretically rich look at working conceptual practices in articulations of time.

Luchien Karsten (2007) ‘Book review: Time’ Time & Society 16, 131-34.
A helpful overview of Barbara Adams’s (2004) Time, in particular regarding its reworking of her earlier (1998) ‘timescape’ concept, of mutually implicated temporalities.

Stephan Kern The Culture of Time & Space 1880-1918 Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
The changes in technology and culture between 880 and the Great War created new experiences of space and time for many people, and Kern explores the impact on cultural production in literature, art, architecture, philosophy and psychology among others over this period, doing so in particular around the perception and actualities of simultaneity, a philosophical concept imbued with space and time, but also a perception experienced by contemporaries concerning the relationship between culture and change.

**Reinhardt Kosseleck (2004) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time [trans. Keith Tribe] New York: Columbia University Press.
The key argument is that in modernity, the past and the present became ‘relocated’ in relation to each other, with the result that the future was shaped as more unknown than previously but also as the product of once imagined futures. Both the translator’s Introduction and the author’s preface are helpful in contextualising Kosseleck’s approach within the German tradition.  Particularly notable in relation to the Whites Writing Whiteness project are chapters 6 and 7, on ‘History, histories and formal time structures’ and ‘Representation, event, and structure’ respectively.

**Reinhardt Kosseleck (2002) The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts [trans. Todd Samuel Presner] Stanford, Cal: Stanford University Press.
Interesting essays linked around a number of covering themes. Historical process has a different kind of temporal order from that of nature, occurring on different levels and occurring at different rates and having a causal force of its own in impacting social life; historical reality is the product on colliding interests between and within groups and in which participants think back reflexively on what happened and ‘what went wrong’; historiography is a discourse, a representational order, rather than the repository of ‘truth’; and that what is called modernity (and postmodernity) is a socially constructed conceptual frame and not a literal descriptor. Of particular interest in the Whites Writing Whiteness context are chapters 6, 7 and 8, on ‘Time and history’, ‘Historical time and social history’ and ‘The unknown future and the art of prognosis’ respectively. Important reading.

Gary Saul Morson (1991) ‘Bakhtin, genres and temporality’ New Literary History 22, 1071-1092.
Moren uses Bakhtin’s ideas to discuss a number of helpful ways of thinking about time, change and becoming in relation to the chronotope concept. The past is understood as constraining the present; people make choices in time, bit by bit, with identity an always unfinished project, which people and the social shaping each other; change is prosaic rather than (usually) the product of crisis and catastrophe, with tiny alterations cumulatively shaping the world, and also messy, incomplete and unsystematic; people live in and think the immediate future, which is unlike the present because not yet; the past is the same sort of time as the present, indeed it is a sequence of previous presents; and the world and time are ‘heterochronous’, for there are many possible senses of the present, many possible pasts can be connected to it, and other versions of the present are also possible. Good to think with.

Gary Saul Morson (1993) ‘Strange synchronies and surplus possibilities: Bakhtin on time’ Slavic Review 52, 477-93.
The author’s and the character’s time is made synchronous, but what about the reader’s time? The reader relies on knowledge made and made available by a text’s author; but the author cannot (usually) control the times of reading.

Patricia Murphy (2001) Time is of the Essence: Temporality, Gender and the New Woman New York: State University of New York Press.
Proposes that an important but rarely explored aspect of the fin de siècle concerned changes in the social construction of time and that the figure and concept of ‘the New Woman’ was central in this as a point at which seismic changes in gender boundaries and relationships cohered. The work of a rather mixed bag – Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, H. Rider Haggard, Sarah Grand and Mona Caird are discussed. The Introduction contains helpful discussion concerning cultural change.

Anne Warfield Rawls (2005) ‘Garfinkel’s conception of time’ Time & Society 14, 163-90.
Discussing the work of Harold Garfinkel on the situated and sequential character of everyday time and its situated practices, Rawls considers time as a constitutive relationship connecting different parts of situated interaction, as individual and historical time versus sequential time, and as a movement from flows to sequences. Sequence is for her key. A useful discussion, although it does not discuss the often eventual character of time, neither a flow not a sequence but (small or large) eruptions in the fabric of the everyday.

Paul Ricoeur (1984, 1985, 1988 [1983, 1984, 1985]) Time and Narrative, Vols 1, 2 and 3 [trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer] Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Impossible to do justice to in a paragraph or two, Ricoeur’s three large volumes join together ‘historical time’ (the time of actions and sequences and changes) and lived time (the time of our lives) regarding the many devices which conjoin them, such as calendars and clocks. The historical present is the time of actions and experiences and narrative is the discourse which represents and brings together actions and events and the contexts these occur in – ‘historical time becomes human time to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full significance when it becomes a condition of temporal existence’ (volume 1, 52).

William H. Sewell Jr. (2005) Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
A well written and engaging exploration of historical time and social theory. Its argument is in particular engaged with time and change in ‘event’ terms, and a more detailed discussion of its arguments will be found in the ‘Events’ reading list.

**Elizabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar and Matt Watson (2012) The Dynamics and Social Practice: Everyday Life and How It Changes London: Sage.
A short, stunning and mind-changing ‘everyday life’ exploration of the rise, change and fall of social practices and the elements (objects, people, behaviours) from which these are formed. Important reading.

Jan Spurk (2004) ‘Simultaneity within non-simultaneity?’ Time & Society 13, 41-49.
Spurk provides a fairly technical discussion of the relation between simultaneous and non-simultaneous temporalities around continuity/rupture/emergence. Ruptures, he points out, are ‘long movements in time with varying rhythms’ (44) involve confrontations of different temporalities (although not just this). Historical time is ‘strange’, he also comments, because ‘we are the history’, with this non-simultaneity part of everyone’s lives. He also makes a useful comparison between experience as the ‘past present’ with its events incorporated, and the ‘future present’ which is not-yet with its events unknown.

Simonetta Tabboni (2001) ‘The idea of time in Norbert Elias’ Time & Society 10, 5-27.
At points quite hard going, this is a disquisition about time that takes off from and at points returns to Elias’s work, rather than an engagement with what Elias writes with detailed references. There are some interesting points, mainly where the discussion stays closest to Elias’s work (for example, on time as the socially-organised connection of two or more sequences of continuous changes).

Eviatar Zerubavel (2003) Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Shape of the Past Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Ignore Zerubavel’s rather heavy-handed approach to the collective aspects of public memory (which Susan Sontag referred to as rather a stipulation ‘you will think this’ and so raising matters of power and state and other institutions), for the rest of his interesting book examines in close detail a wide variety of the different ways in which memory and the past are invoked and used. Helpful, while of course remembering that no such listing can be exhaustive of how this is actually done.

B. About Time and Change in South Africa