Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

All social life is ordered over time and through space. However, when sociologists attend to the “situated” character of social life, they do not treat time-space as simply the temporal and spatial environment of the phenomena they study. They see social life as not just being “in” time-space, they see time-space as central to all social interaction. The “situatedness” of social life involves time-space as a constitutive feature in the construction and reconstruction of what people do and in the way they do things together. The ordering of social life comes about because social practices are routinely made to come together across time-space as shared experiences. This binding of time-space is expressed in the ways in which societies, institutions, and individuals organize time-space. Anthony Giddens draws attention to three features that need to be addressed by sociologists when seeking to understand the way in which social life is ordered across time-space. The first involves the construction and reconstruction of regularized social interaction across time-space through informed practices. Take, for example, the actions and interactions relating to the lending and borrowing of a library book. These are knowledgeable activities involving the understanding of a range of time-space relations by both lenders and borrowers. A borrowed book has to be returned before the elapse of a specific ... log in or subscribe to read full text