What Is Social Time and Why Does It Move Unevenly?
Time is not just a valuable resource; it is also a coordinate system that humanity has tried to organize and standardize for decades using time zones, calendars, and other tools. Still, we can’t say that we live only in astronomical time, measured by hours, minutes, or years. According to sociologists, we live in social (or sociocultural) time, which is constructed around social practices and events.
What Is Social Time?
Social time is a concept created in 1937 by sociologists Pitirim Sorokin and Robert Merton. They noticed that people live not only within a unified system of time coordinates—such as minutes, months, and years—but also within a temporal space dictated by social events and practices.
One example of social time is the construct of the “week.” In most countries, a week consists of seven days—this is a tradition, although the number of work and rest days was originally determined by the market activity of a particular society. The now-classic seven-day week came from the ancient Romans, but the ancient Maya used a 13-day week, after the French Revolution there was a 10-day week, and in 1931 the Soviet government proposed a six-day week. This example shows how flexible this social construct is, but it is not the only example of social time.
Social time is also closely linked to cultural practices. Each social group may have its own, and the measures of social time will only make sense to members of the group familiar with those practices. For example, if a European asks you about your plans for the Easter holidays, they mean two non-working weeks in the middle of spring, while people in countries where this practice doesn’t exist might not understand what is meant or why stores across the country operate on reduced hours for two weeks. Similarly, in Southern European countries, the siesta—a midday break during the hottest hours—is a normal part of life for Italians and Spaniards, but would seem completely unacceptable and confusing to Germans.
Another important feature of social time is how it is filled with events that define its qualitative characteristics and help people orient themselves in time. For example, when someone says “the twenties of the twentieth century,” different social groups will have different associations: the “Roaring Twenties” in the USA, the NEP period in Russia, the postwar crisis in Germany, and other social circumstances that characterized that period for a particular country or group.
How Does Social Time Move?
The boundaries of social time differ from those set by astronomical time. Its various periods can be tied to major events affecting all layers of society (such as the pandemic), but at the same time, alongside these large periods, other periods—longer or shorter, fitting within or extending beyond the larger period—can develop. For example, the lockdown period, the era of remote work, the time of COVID restrictions, and the period when those restrictions were lifted. Simultaneously, there can be periods affecting small groups, which may be only loosely or not at all connected to the larger period. For many people, the lockdown was also a time when children were always at home, or when group concert outings were replaced by watching livestreams together. For some, an important period of social time might be the intervals of so-called Mercury retrograde, during which entire groups of people are ready to avoid certain activities.
Social time has many levels, and at each level, it moves at a different speed. This characteristic is determined by the number of events occurring within a given period. According to Sorokin and Merton, the more events in a period of social time, the faster and more saturated it seems to us. The opposite is also true: the fewer the events, the more it feels like time has stopped. Many people experienced this “pause” during the sudden lockdown in 2020. In this case, individual time—how a person perceives time—becomes the defining factor.
Although the concept of social time was generally well received by the professional community and is still actively cited and interpreted today, it has not become central in sociology. Humanity’s relationship with time remains a vast field of research for cultural theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers, so “social time” is still just one (albeit a rather convincing) theory.