![]() ![]() What she's interested in across cultures is how people regulate themselves. "For my work, it doesn't matter what culture you're from," she says. In any given culture, there are clock-time and event-time people living in it - sometimes synchronously and sometimes not, says Anne-Laure Sellier, a business professor at HEC Paris who studies the time mindsets of individuals. It's a way of life that was much more common historically and still remains the way of life for much of the world today. While some highly industrialized nations operate on what scholars call " clock time," where the time of day governs when an activity begins and ends, Belize was on " event time," where social events have a stronger influence on the flow of activities. There was a general cultural recognition, she says, that "people aren't always in control of the management of time." Whereas in the U.S., where "you're valued according to how timely you are," she says, a missed appointment in Belize, at least back then, was no big deal: "Something comes up and they're not trying to be disrespectful, but sometimes the bus is late, sometimes there's an accident," McClaurin says. There, she had a revelation - that the importance of being on time is not a universal fact, but a cultural construct. graduate student studying the way women organized in their communities. In the 1990s, McClaurin traveled to the small Central American country of Belize as a U.S. Shots - Health News For 'time cells' in the brain, what matters is what happens in the moment That's when the increasing demands of factory work and the growth of railroads combined with the new boom in factory-made clocks and watches to create a new, more rigid expectation of punctuality. Strictly timing our day by the clock - the whole notion of being on time - took off with the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, McClaurin explains. "Clock time" versus "event time" - how did we get here? Equating punctuality with high value is a shortsighted view of history and a narrow view of world cultures, she and other scholars say. ![]() "We've created this schema that somehow 'being on time' is evidence of how much you value something," says Irma McClaurin, an anthropologist, independent scholar and founder of the Black Feminist Archive, which is based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Maybe your friends and family members need to chill and stop considering their perspective on punctuality to be clearly and in every way superior. And when it's time for a rocket launch, every team member needs to be working in sync to get to BLASTOFF.īut often, in other situations, there's room for give-and-take. If you're consistently late to work, you might lose your job. If you don't get to the airport gate before it closes, the plane leaves without you. Sure, there are situations where being punctual or even a little early is highly valuable and consequential. Finding Time Researchers say time is an illusion. ![]()
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