ABSTRACT
Recording the passage of time, marking the remembrance of things past and the celebration of individual and collective events, constitute a basic preoccupation of humankind. Such activities are the cornerstone of religious practice, and underpin the social cohesion of family, community and nation; and while time can be understood as long-term secular shifts, or as shorter term seasonal periodicities, all human situations are subject to everyday routines, which may comprise the symbolic, the social or economically necessary. Time and timing are integral to basic economic activities, reflected in agricultural, pastoral and industrial practices, which are performed within specific spaces. And there is a sense in which time and space are inseparable. But the manner in which time and space are measured and evaluated is embedded within different technologies and cultures. Thus profound economic and social changes are usually accompanied by new patterns and perceptions of time and space in the home and workplace, as well as shaping leisure. Arguably agricultural and industrial revolutions, and their economic and social transformations can be viewed through changing paradigms of time. In a 1967 essay, E.P. Thompson explored the shift from task-orientated time to waged-labour time in Britain, where time once ‘passed’ became ‘spent’, and time-disciplined factory work became the subject of worker-employer struggles as hours lengthened (Thompson 1967). The internalisation of these new concepts of time and labour was achieved by imposition and assumption, and their spread was neither sudden, nor universal.
