In sociology and anthropology, time discipline is the general name given to
social and economic rules, conventions, customs, and expectations governing the
measurement of time, the social currency and awareness of time measurements, and
people's expectations concerning the observance of these customs by others.
The concept of "time discipline" as a field of special attention in sociology
and anthropology was pioneered by E. P. Thompson in Time, Work-Discipline, and
Industrial Capitalism, published in 1967. Coming from a Marxist viewpoint,
Thompson argued that observance of clock-time is a consequence of the
European industrial revolution, and that neither industrial capitalism nor the
creation of the modern state would have been possible without the imposition of
synchronic forms of time and work discipline. The new clock time imposed
by government and capitalist interests replaced earlier, collective perceptions
of time that Thompson believed flowed from the collective wisdom of human
societies. While in fact it appears likely that earlier views of time were
imposed instead by religious and other social authorities prior to the
industrial revolution, Thompson's work identified time discipline as an
important concept for study within the social sciences.
The natural world In societies based around agriculture,
hunting, and other pursuits that involve human interaction with the natural
world, time discipline is a matter governed by astronomical and biological
factors. Specific times of day or seasons of the year are defined by
reference to these factors, and measured, to the extent that they need
measuring, by observation. Different peoples' needs with respect to these
things mean sharply differing cultural perceptions of time. For example, it
surprises many non-Muslims that the Islamic calendar is entirely lunar and
makes no reference at all to the seasons; the desert-dwelling Arabs who
devised it were nomads rather than agriculturalists, and a calendar that
made no reference to the seasons was no inconvenience for most of them.
In Western societies In more urban societies, some of these
natural phenomena were no longer at hand, and most were of much less
consequence to the inhabitants. Artificial means of dividing and
measuring time were needed. Plautus complained of the social effect of the
invention of such divisions in his lines complaining of the sundial:
The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sun-dial, To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions. When I was a boy My belly was my sun-dial; one more sure,
Truer, and more exact than any of them. This dial told me when 'twas proper time
To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat.
But now-a-days, why, even when I have, I can't fall-to, unless the sun give
leave. The town's so full of these confounded
dials, The greatest part of its inhabitants,
Shrunk up with hunger, creep along the streets.
Plautus's protagonist here complains about the social discipline and
expectations that arose when these measurements of time were introduced.
The invention of artificial units of time measurement made the introduction
of time management possible, and time management was not universally
appreciated by those whose time was managed.
= Western religious influences = In western Europe, the practice of
Christian monasticism introduced new factors into the time discipline
observed by members of religious communities. The rule of Saint Benedict
introduced canonical hours; these were religious observances that were held on
a daily basis, and based on factors again mostly unrelated to natural
phenomena. It is no surprise, then, that religious communities were likely the
inventors, and certainly the major consumers, of early clocks. The
invention of the mechanical clock in western Europe, and its subsequent
technical developments, enabled a public time discipline even less related to
natural phenomena. = The invention of the clock =
The English word clock comes from an Old French word for "bell," for the striking
feature of early clocks was a greater concern than their dials. Shakespeare's
Sonnet XII begins, "When I do count the clock that tells the time." Even after
the introduction of the clock face, clocks were costly, and found mostly in
the homes of aristocrats. The vast majority of urban dwellers had to rely
on clock towers, and outside the sight of their dials or the sound of their
bells, clock time held no sway. Clock towers did define the time of day, at
least for those who could hear and see them. As the saying goes, "a person with
a clock always knows what time it is; a person with two clocks is never sure."
= Improvements of the clock = The discipline imposed by these public
clocks still remained lax by contemporary standards. A clock that
only strikes the hours can only record the nearest hour that has passed; most
early clocks had only hour hands in any case. Minute hands did not come into
widespread use until the pendulum enabled a large leap in the accuracy of
clocks; for watches, a similar leap in accuracy was not made possible before
the invention of the balance spring. Before these improvements, the equation
of time, the difference between apparent and mean solar time, was not even
noticed. During the 17th and 18th centuries,
private ownership of clocks and watches became more common, as their improved
manufacture made them available for purchase by at least the bourgeoisie of
the cities. Their proliferation had many social and even religious consequences
for those who could afford and use them. Religious consequences
Religious texts of the period make many more references to the irreversible
passage of time, and artistic themes appeared at this time such as Vanitas, a
reminder of death in the form of a still life, which always included a watch,
clock, or some other timepiece. The relentless ticking of a clock or watch,
and the slow but certain movement of its hands, functioned as a visible and
audible memento mori. Clocks and sundials would be decorated with mottos
such as ultima forsan or vulnerant omnes, ultima necat. Even today, clocks
often carry the motto tempus fugit, "time flies." Mary, Queen of Scots was
said to have owned a large watch made in the shape of a silver skull.
Economic consequences Economically, their impact was even
greater; an awareness that time is money, a limited commodity not to be
wasted, also appears during this period. Because Protestantism was at this time
chiefly a religion of literate city dwellers, the so-called "Protestant work
ethic" came to be associated with this newly fashioned time discipline.
Production of clocks and watches during this period shifted from Italy and
Bavaria to Protestant areas such as Geneva, the Netherlands, and England;
the names of French clockmakers during this time disclose a large number of
commonly Huguenot names from the Old Testament.
= Standard, synchronous, public time = In the nineteenth century, the
introduction of standard time and time zones divorced the "time of day" from
local mean solar time and any links to astronomy. Time signals, like the bells
and dials of public clocks, once were relatively local affairs; the ball that
is dropped in Times Square on New Year's Eve in New York City once served as a
time signal whose original purpose was for navigators to check their marine
chronometers. However, when the railroads began running trains on
complex schedules, keeping a schedule that could be followed over distances of
hundreds of miles required synchronization on a scale not attempted
before. Telegraphy and later shortwave radio were used to broadcast time
signals from the most accurate clocks available. Radio and television
broadcasting schedules created a further impetus to regiment everyone's clock so
that they all told the same time within a very small tolerance; the broadcasting
of time announcements over radio and television enabled all the households in
their audience to get in synch with the clocks at the network.
The mass production of clocks and watches further tightened time
discipline in the Western world; before these machines were made, and made to be
more accurate, it would be pointless to complain about someone's being fifteen,
or five, minutes late. For many employees, the time clock was the clock
that told the time that mattered: it was the clock that recorded their hours of
work. By the time that time clocks became commonplace, public, synchronized
clock time was considered a fact of life. Uniform, synchronized, public
clock time did not exist until the nineteenth century.
When one speaks about the intellectual history of time, one essentially is
stating that changes have occurred in the way humans experience and measure
time. Our conceived abstract notions of time have presumably developed in
accordance with our art, our science, and our social infrastructure.
Towards time-keeping The units of time first developed by
humans would likely have been days and months. In some parts of the world the
cycle of seasons is apparent enough to lead to people speaking about years and
seasons. With the invention of agriculture in the 3rd millennium BC,
people relied heavily on the cycle of the seasons for planting and harvesting
crops. Most humans came to live in settled societies and the whole
community relied upon accurate predictions of the seasonal cycle. This
led to the development of calendars. Over time, some people came to recognize
patterns of the stars with the seasons. Learning astronomy became an assigned
duty for certain people so they could coordinate the lunar and solar calendars
by adding days or months to the year. At about the same time, sundials were
developed, likely marked first at noon, sunrise and sunset. In ancient Sumer and
Egypt, numbers were soon used to divide the day into 12 hours; the night was
similarly divided. In Egypt there is not as much seasonal variation in the length
of the day, but those further from the equator would need to make many more
modifications in calibrating their sundials to deal with these differences.
Ancient traditions did not begin the day at midnight, some starting at dawn
instead, others at dusk. Since a sundial has only one "hand," a
minute probably only meant "a short time." It took centuries for technology
to make measurements precise enough for minutes to become fixed meaningful
units—longer still for milliseconds, nanoseconds, and further subdivisions.
When the water clock was invented, time could also be measured at night—though
there was significant variation in flow rate and less accuracy and precision.
With water clocks, and also candle clocks, modifications were made to have
them make sounds on a regular basis. With the invention of the hourglass,
hours and units of time smaller than an hour could be measured much more
reliably than with water clocks and candle clocks.
The earliest reasonably accurate mechanical clocks are the 13th century
tower clocks probably developed for monks in Northern Italy. Using gears and
gradually falling weights, these were adjusted to conform with canonical
hours—which varied with the length of the day. As these were used primarily to
ring bells for prayer, the clock dial likely only came later. When dials were
eventually incorporated into clocks, they were analogous to the dials on
sundials, and, like a sundial, the clocks themselves had only one hand.
A possible explanation for the shift from having the first hour being the one
after dawn, to having the hour after noon being designated as 1 pm, is that
these clocks would likely regularly be reset at local high noon each day. This,
of course, results in midnight becoming 12 o'clock.
Peter Henlein, a locksmith and burgher of Nuremberg, Germany, invented a
spring-powered clock around 1510. It had only one hand, had no glass cover, and
was rather imprecise because it slowed down as the spring unwound. In fact,
Henlein went so far as to develop the first portable watch; it was six inches
high. People usually carried it by hand, or wore it around their necks or in
large pockets. The first reported person to actually wear a watch on the wrist
was the French mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal. He attached
his pocket watch to his wrist with a piece of string.
In 1577, the minute hand was added by a Swiss clock maker, Jost Burgi, and was
incorporated into a clock Burgi made for astronomer Tycho Brahe, who had a need
for more accuracy as he charted the heavens.
Isochronous time With invention of the pendulum clock in
1656 by Christiaan Huygens, came isochronous time, with a fixed pace of
3600 seconds per hour. By 1680, both a minute hand and then a second hand were
added. Some of the first of these had a separate dial for the minute hand, and a
second hand that took 5 minutes per cycle. [1] Even as late as 1773, towns
were content to order clocks without minute hands.[2]
But the clocks were still aligned with the local noonday sun. Following the
invention of the locomotive in 1830, time had to be synchronized across vast
distances in order to organize the train schedules. This eventually led to the
development of time zones, and, thus, global isochronous time. These time
changes were not accepted everywhere right away, because many people's lives
were still tied closely to the length of the daytime. With the invention in 1879
of the light bulb, that changed too. The isochronous clock changed lives.
Appointments are rarely "within the hour," but at quarter hours. People
often eat, drink, sleep, and even go to the bathroom in adherence to some
time-dependent schedule. See also
Punctuality Timeline of time measurement technology
Timeline of historic inventions 12-hour clock
References Further reading
The Discoverers – Daniel J. Boorstin Theory Out of Bounds – Isabelle
Stengers/Ilya Prigogine Order out of Chaos – Ilya Prigogine
Multifractals and 1/f noise – Benoît Mandelbrot
Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time – Michel Serres; et al.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – Thomas S. Kuhn
Technics and Civilization – Lewis Mumford
Landes, David: Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern
World: ISBN 0-674-76800-0 Aveni, Anthony: Empires of Time:
Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures: ISBN 0-465-01951-X
Thompson, EP: Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism. Past & Present
38(1), 56–97 External links
24-hour analog clocks 1773 town in Scotland orders clock
without minute hand Quotes About Time Passing
Huygens' clocks Early Clock Face with separate minute
dial BBC article on shortest time ever
measured as of 2004. Upside Down and Backwards: Time
Discipline in a Canadian Inuit Town by Pamela Stern of the University of
Waterloo.