Culture or Context: a Qualitative Approach Investigating the Relationship of Scheduling Styles and Situational Context in Uganda and Germany

Previous literature suggested that different countries and regions are associated with different temporal cultures resulting in according scheduling styles: people in anglo-european countries supposedly plan and structure their life predominantly according to the clock (clock time orientation) while people in some other parts of the world are more prone to live their lives in disregard of clock time but follow inner needs and/or the structure given by the events that happen in their lives (event time orientation). However, recent research shows that scheduling styles are also adaptive responses to situational demands and event and clock timing are associated with different experiences of control. Transferring these findings to a cross-cultural setting, we investigated whether situational context is the predominant factor explaining the application of different scheduling styles. To this end, we used a mixed-methods approach with semi-structured interviews exploring whether participants from Uganda and Germany (employees with fixed working hours) differ in the level to which they structure their narratives of daily routines of time associated with work primarily in reference to the clock while recounting free time predominantly in reference to events and/or inner needs. Our data, processed using qualitative content analysis, show this pattern for the participants from both countries. Overall interviewees from Germany do not refer to the clock more often than their Ugandan counterparts. This suggests that individuals’ scheduling styles reflect intersituational adaptations to a given demand for synchronization rather than being kind of a strong cultural imprint on individuals.

The Heist: Neoliberal Education and the Theft of Time

In education, time is a scarce commodity. Through prescriptive policy, and scripted curriculum in some jurisdictions, policy makers attempt to steal local teacher and learner control over what is taught, how it is taught, and what is learned. That theft amounts to a heist. While clock-time cannot (and should not) be disregarded, this paper offers a critique of conventional views on time as it is embedded in neoliberal education policy and practice. In this paper we ask how education can better contribute to more durable learning by taking up alternate conceptions of time. By dispensing with high levels of standardization and prescription and instead focusing on an education of experience, relevant to learners and not bound by chronos, schools might encourage la durée, or durable learning, resulting in education focusing on teaching students how to live well with others in a meaningful .

Ethnographic Reflections on Event-Time in Jail

This chapter marshals ethnographic data from county jails in southern California to examine how a penal environment shapes the ways prisoners experience time, track time, and orient themselves to the past, present, or future. Building from research that conceptualizes the ordering of social behavior according to “event” or “clock” time, it is argued that incoming prisoners experience a disorienting incongruity between clock time in free society and event time in jail. Temporal congruity is conceptualized as another kind of social need like identity verification, group inclusivity, and other basic social needs identified by social psychologists. Additionally, and in part because penal time was organized around events, prisoners use somewhat idiosyncratic quality-of-life events to create timetables and thereby break indefinite time into manageable segments. Finally, a relationship between self-efficacy and temporal orientation (past, present, or future) is shown with the argument that as self-efficacy increases, so does the likelihood of prisoners being oriented to the future. On the other hand, the lower the self-efficacy, the greater the likelihood of an orientation to the present. Given the findings, it is recommended that jails operate on more conventional time schedules with regular access to natural light. This work has implications for the sociology of time as well as future studies of punishment.

Upgrading Spatiotemporal Demographic Data by the Integration of Detailed Population Attributes

In this study, a method was constructed for adding value to spatiotemporal data by integrating demographic information obtained from Mobile Spatial Statistics (MSS), Person-trip (PT) data, and the national census. We first constructed a model that provided spatiotemporal distribution of occupants in urban areas that vary according to clock time, location, and building use classification. The time, location, and building use classification were employed as keys to integrate demographic information. Weekday and weekend data for the central wards of Tokyo were employed to create estimates of the number of occupants with their detailed attributes. Using numerical examples, we demonstrated that the proposed model can provide demographic spatiotemporal distributions with far higher value than before; in which the buildings people occupy, their reasons for being there, their sex and age bracket, and their residential locations, can all be identified.

Order of magnitude wall time improvement of variational methane inversions by physical parallelization: a demonstration using TM5-4DVAR

Atmospheric inversions are used to constrain the emissions of trace gases from atmospheric mole fraction measurements. The variational (4DVAR) inversion approach allows optimization of the emissions at a much higher temporal and spatial resolution than the ensemble or analytical approaches but provides limited opportunities for scalable parallelization as the optimization is performed iteratively. Multidecadal variational inversions are used to optimally extract information from the long measurement records of long-lived atmospheric trace gases like carbon dioxide and methane. However, the wall clock time needed—up to months— complicates these multidecadal inversions. The physical parallelization method introduced by Chevallier (2013) addresses this problem for CO2 inversions by splitting the time period of the chemical transport model into blocks that are run in parallel. Here we present a new implementation of the physical parallelization for variational inversion (PPVI) approach that is suitable for methane inversions as it accounts for methane’s atmospheric lifetime. The performance of PPVI is tested in an 11-year inversion using a TM5-4DVAR inversion setup that assimilates surface observations to optimize methane emissions at grid-scale. We find that the PPVI inversion approach improves the wall clock time performance by a factor of 5 and shows excellent agreement with the posterior emissions of a full serial inversion with identical configuration (global mean emissions difference = 0.06 % with an interannual variation correlation R = 99 %; regional mean emission difference < 5 % and interannual variation R > 0.95). The wall clock time improvement using the PPVI method increases with the size of the inversion period. The PPVI approach is planned to be used in future releases of the CAMS (Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service) multidecadal methane reanalysis.

Tempo życia – tempo biografii. Wstęp do badań nad problematyką czasu w biografiach Brunona Schulza

A biographer has a great ability to operate with time. He/she lengthens or shortens parts of his/her story, which makes meanings and gives a hierarchy to events. A biographer’s actions have consequences because the time of the biography relates to the time of a character’s life: the clock time and time as it is experienced. One period that is traditionally abridged in a character’s life is childhood. By abridging it, a biographer may renege on a moral pact. The case of Bruno Schulz’s abridged childhood is of particular importance because of his work and declarations.

Relationship Between Big Five Personality Dimensions, Chronotype, and DSM-V Personality Disorders

Morningness-eveningness (M/E) is an important variable in individual differences and has an impact on many areas of life including general and mental health. In previous work eveningness has shown to correlate to personality disorders (PDs) and mental instability such as psychoticism, depression, and bipolar disorders. Therefore, a relationship between M/E and PDs can be assumed but has never been tested. The aim of this study was to assess a possible relationship between DSM-5-PDs and circadian timing (chronotype; M/E). We used the Morningness-Eveningness Stability Scale improved and clock time-based measurements, the PID-5 brief version, and the Big Five brief version. Sample: N = 630; mean age: 27.76 years, SD: 11.36 years; 137 male, 489 female, 4 diverse. In this short screening a relationship between eveningness and DSM-5-personality traits, (evening-oriented participants showing a higher PID-5 score: morningness -0.208/p &lt; 0.001; eveningness: 0.153/p &lt; 0.001) was found. Moreover, participants with high levels of distinctness (fluctuations of the perceived energy level during the day) are prone to PDs too, with distinctness being the best predictor for a high PID-5 score in this sample (0.299/p &lt; 0.001). In the regression analysis, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion contributed significantly to the model with higher scores on extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness being related to lower scores on the PID-5. Neuroticism was positively related to PID-5 scores. Later midpoint of sleep (higher eveningness) was associated with higher PID-5 scores, as were higher fluctuations/amplitude during the day.

Time Theft in the Los Angeles Retail Sector: The Need for New Labor Standards and a Fair Workweek

We argue that employers subject workers to time theft by controlling workers’ time—both on and off the clock. Time theft considers employer control of workers’ time without the promise of pay through unstable scheduling practices as well as beyond their scheduled work hours. We develop a typology of time theft through a discussion of survey and workshop data with retail workers in Los Angeles. We underscore how federal labor law is inadequate to address unstable scheduling and we discuss retail worker organizing and the implications of time theft for labor policy and worker movements.