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Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience, by Helga Nowotny. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1994. 179 pp. $29.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-7456-0892-2.
Five hundred and ninety million wristwatches are made in Hong Kong each year. Watches attach us to our schedules. But how do our schedules evolve? What prior expectations underlie them? What time horizon, what pace of life, what coordination between different lines of action does our personal feeling about time reflect? How has our way of "telling time," in all these ways, changed over the last 200 years? And why? In her wide-ranging, complex, and important book, Helga Nowotny, current president of the International Society for the Study of Time and an Austrian sociologist of science, takes these questions on.
The rich literature on the society of time ranges from works by Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Norbert Elias to those by Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Pitirim Sorokin, Niklas Luhmann, Carmen Sirianni, Eviatar Zerubavel, Edward Hall, and Tamara Hareven, among many others. One preoccupation in this literature has been the effect of the commodification of time on public struggles and private feelings about time. A second discourse concerns women's entrance into the workplace and the scarcity of time. Nowotny picks up where these two traditions leave off.
She proceeds on the premise that time refers both to something real in the world and to an idea we make up to guide our actions in that world. Drawing from Norbert Elias, Nowotny notes that some primitive peoples see in their ceremonial masks the qualities of gods or demons, although everyone knows that people are behind the masks. The appointment diary, she suggests, is a modern mask We imbue it with apparent power to control our time. But it is we who fill out our diaries.
From relativity theory, Nowotny borrows the concept and term "proper time." The German word for "proper time" is Eigenzeit. This, the title of her...