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Michael G. FlahertyAge and agency: Time work across the life course

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Article

Age and agency: Timework across the lifecourse

Michael G. FlahertyEckerd College, USA

Abstract

Scholars have observed growing variability in life course transitions, such as

entry into a full-time job. Life course theorists use the concept of agency

to account for increasing diversity and unpredictability in developmental

trajectories. In so doing, they presume that agency can only be a source of

heterogeneity. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 406 people from all walks

of life, I examine a form of temporal agency or time work that is, efforts to

modify ones own experience of time or that of others. The findings suggest that

agency does not operate in the way life course theorists envision.

Keywords

Age, agency, life course, temporal experience, time

Introduction

Journalists and other members of the scribbling trades are prone to namegenerations as a descriptive shorthand. The Baby Boomers were followedby Generation X, which was followed by Generation Y or the Millennials.Generation Y represents people who are in their 20s, and they are earning areputation for being less independent than their predecessors. So many ofthem return home after graduating from college that they are also calledboomerang kids. This tendency is not the result of psychological mal-adjustment, but the sociological fact that they are launching their careersduring a period of economic retrenchment.

Corresponding author:

Michael G. Flaherty, Department of Sociology, Eckerd College, 4200 54th Avenue South,

St. Petersburg, Florida, 33711, USA.

Email: [email protected]

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Generational monikers result from anecdotal impressions, not carefulresearch. They are stereotypes, and it is easy to think of countless excep-tions. Behind these sweeping generalizations, however, we can glimpse aclassic version of sociological determinism. Presumably, ones behavior andexperience are shaped by the fact that one is a product of a particulargeneration, but how do generations have this eect? Human beings areconditioned by their social location, argues Mannheim (1952 [1927]: 297),and the concept of generation is a temporal variation on this fundamentalinsight: Members of a generation are similarly located not necessarilyin geography or social structure, but in time. As such, they share the handi-caps and privileges inherent in that temporal location; they are members ofthe same historical community (Mannheim, 1952 [1927]: 303).

Following Mannheim, generations are commonly dened with referenceto a specic historical event or period (e.g. the War generation or the gener-ation of the Great Depression). Yet what period of time do we refer to as ageneration? Mannheim (1952 [1927]: 278) observed that the duration of ageneration is . . . variously estimated at something between 15 and 30 years.Thus, as a unit of time, the generation is imprecise and irregular. For thisreason, sociologists who study the life course examine cohorts that is,categories of people who were born within a specic period of time (e.g.those born between 1952 and 1962), or who have a given age at a certaintime (e.g. those between 50 and 60 years of age in 2012). There is a presump-tion that roughly the same things will happen to these people at roughly thesame time because they are roughly the same age. Sociologists refer to thispattern as cohort eects. Twenty years ago, Clausen (1991: 806) found thesociological emphasis on cohort eects unsatisfactory: My preferred con-ception of the life course, he declared, entails negotiation by a reexive selfof a set of potentially available roles that are interlinked and to which personscommit themselves to varying degrees at dierent periods of their lives. Inthis statement, Clausen questions the emphasis on cohort eects by invokinga reexive self, which, regardless of ones age, makes for variability in onescommitment to social roles. Life course transitions result from decisions, butthe statistical analysis of cohort eects does not take subjectivity and inter-action into account.

When does one become an adult? According to Shanahan (2000: 667),the transition to adulthood is marked by life course events, such as leavingschool, starting a full-time job, leaving the home of origin, getting married,and becoming a parent for the rst time. The measurement of these tran-sitions changed during the years following Clausens critique of cohorteects. Shanahan (2000: 667) notes that previous research had emphasizedcentral tendencies in these life course events (for example, the median ageat rst marriage). This approach ignored the growing variation

238 Time & Society 22(2)


within cohorts. Shanahan adds that, in accord with Clausens conception ofthe life course, Research of the past two decades . . . has increasinglyfocused on the variability of these transitions.

The life course paradigm emerged from this critique of cohort analysis.Presumably, a given cohort is exposed to the same social and historicalenvironment, which brings about correlations between age and variousforms of behavior or experience. But how does this occur? One can onlyspeculate. As Elder and ORand (1995: 455) put it, a cohort approach toadult lives . . . identies broad categories of potential inuences that provideno clear understanding of the mechanisms which link history with individ-ual development or change. Moreover, Elder and ORand (1995: 457) chal-lenge the root assumption of cohort analysis by calling attention to thegreat variability within cohorts:

The life course is age-graded according to generalized divisions or categories,

from childhood to old age, but members of a birth cohort do not move

through this age structure in concert according to the social roles they

occupy. Age at entry into a full-time job, completion of formal education,

cohabitation and marriage, the birth of the rst child these and other events

in the transition to adulthood are not experienced by all members of a birth

cohort, and those who experience them do so at widely varied times in life.

With their life course perspective, Elder and ORand (1995: 458) redirectedthe focus of research from the invariant stages of adult life . . . and the over-socialized view of development . . . to the ongoing processes by which livesare constructed and reconstructed from birth to death in ways only weaklycorrelated with age. If cohort analysis is not the correct approach, whatshould we do instead? The response from Elder and other students of thelife course is implicit in the foregoing quotation. Assuming a constructioniststance, they assert that we should attend to what cohort analysis disregards:namely, the decision-making processes associated with the self and self-determination, or what sociologists since Giddens (1979: 56) have calledagency. In what follows, I try to show that this way of compensating forthe shortcomings of cohort analysis brings about its own problems withtheory and method.

Giddens (1979: 56) denes agency as self-consciously intentional eort tochange the trajectory of social interaction It is a necessary feature of actionthat, at any point in time, the agent could have acted otherwise: eitherpositively in terms of attempted intervention in the process of events in theworld, or negatively in terms of forbearance. Clearly, agency concerns theexercise of choice or self-determination, as Mead (1934: 25) would have it.In contrast, social structure represents enduring patterns of behavior or

Flaherty 239


experience that are rooted in abstract positions. The externality and con-straint of social structure is supposed to make for determinism, not self-determination. If there is agency, how is social structure possible, andvice versa?

Since the formulation of agency, there has been a erce and ongoingdebate about how to reconcile the apparent contradictions betweenagency and structure. Alexander (1988: 77) established the parameters forthis debate: Neither micro nor macro theory is satisfactory. Action andstructure must now be intertwined. According to Collins (1992: 77), how-ever, the distinction between agency and structure does not pose anexplanatory question but an idealogical one, because this distinction rep-resents nothing more than an eort to show that human beings controltheir own destinies. Collins (1992: 78) urges his colleagues to stop worryingabout agency, but they have not taken his advice. Sewell (1992) as well asEmirbayer and Mische (1998) strive to theorize agency, while Callero (1994:228) echoes Alexander: any attempt to conceptualize social structure mustultimately confront the dilemma posed by the problem of agency.

We can dene time work as ones eort to promote or suppress a par-ticular form of temporal experience (Flaherty, 2003: 19). Time work is aspecies of agency because it involves the intentional self-determination oftemporal experience. In this article, I show that the empirical study of timework enables us to reconcile agency and structure because, in large measure,such agency contributes to the establishment and maintenance of temporalstructure.

Agency and the life course

Those who study human development nd themselves confronted byincreasing diversity and unpredictability of life course trajectories (Lutfeyand Mortimer, 2006: 190). They have turned to the social psychology ofagency in an eort to understand this growing heterogeneity in their data.Yet, on the face of it, agency is not a concept that sits comfortably within anotherwise macro-sociological and deterministic framework. As it stands,consequently, the parts of this framework are not integrated in a coherenttheory. The role of agency in the life course remains paradoxical because therelationship between determinism and self-determination is left unresolved.Thus, agency becomes something akin to a ghost in the machine.

In their paradigmatic statements, life course scholars repeatedly refer toa deterministic social environment and the self-determination of agencywithout clarifying: (1) how these factors are related to one another; or (2)how life course transitions result from their combined inuence. Consider,for example, this extract from Elder (1994: 4): Developmentalists have



gained more sensitivity to the interlocking nature of human lives and gen-erations, as well as an informed awareness of individuals as choice makersand agents of their own lives. Similarly, Elder and ORand (1995: 453, 455)rst conrm that The life course . . . refers to age-graded life patternsembedded in social institutions and subject to historical change, and thenadd that The distinctive contextual theme in contemporary studies of adultlives is coupled with an appreciation of the plasticity and agency of theindividual. Gubrium et al. (1994: 199) also endorse this dualistic formulabut quickly admit to some discomfort with its ambiguity: The life course isa product of human discretion and interpretation, even as it reects therationalizations of modern society. There is, however, a certain tensionregarding agency in this imagery. Indeed, this tension emanates from anunresolved paradox at the heart of the life course paradigm.

Hitlin and Elder (2007) are, themselves, troubled by the current concep-tualization of agency, which they disparage as curiously abstract. Theirextensive review makes it apparent that social scientists have not come toterms with agency. Nonetheless, it has become a heralded, if enigmatic,component in the developmental perspective. Rather than birth cohortsprogressing from one life stage to another in a fairly uniform manner(Lutfey and Mortimer, 2006: 190), Elder (1994: 5) proposes a more varie-gated model consisting of transitions and trajectories. Transitions areturning points in the life course, such as the birth of ones rst child.They mark signicant changes in ones social status. Trajectories representalternative paths through the life course for example, a career in militaryservice versus higher education and subsequent white-collar employment.These concepts are meant to embrace agency because both transitions andtrajectories are viewed, at least in part, as self-selected outcomes. Elder(1994: 5) identies four themes [that] deserve special note as central tothe life course paradigm. The rst three are familiar aspects of social struc-ture (the interplay of human lives and historical times, the timing of lives,linked or interdependent lives), while the fourth is human agency in choicemaking. As one would expect, Elder (1994: 5) avows that his perspectivetends to stress the social forces that shape the life course and its develop-mental consequences. Despite the proclaimed inclusion of agency, there arestill social forces, and they still have consequences for the life course. Inthis formulation, agency remains unassimilated neither fully conceptua-lized nor operationalized.

We can nd the same tension in Clausens (1991: 811) analysis of planfulcompetence that is, ones ability to make well-considered choices con-cerning the future. On the one hand, he states that the life course is acreation of the person (Clausen, 1991: 805), which certainly seems toplace the responsibility for ones life squarely on the individual. It would

Flaherty 241


appear that the life course is purely an artifact of choice or self-determination. On the other hand, however, he argues that Societies andtheir cultures . . . tend to shape individual lives (Clausen, 1991: 805),because the choices are constrained by the institutional structures withinwhich the person must t (1991: 806). What are we glossing over with thephrase constrained choices? What does it mean? Presumably, sociologyand its social forces are represented by constraint on individual volition.By implication, then, choice would seem to represent something else, some-thing that is not sociological, something that can account for observedvariability in the life course. But Clausen is at pains to point out that planfulcompetence is a product of (i.e. caused by) ones prior socialization (1991:838), and he demonstrates that it can inuence the life course over a periodof 40 or more years beyond adolescence (1991: 811). Once again, despitethe vaunted inclusion of agency, we have arrived at predetermined causesand their predictable consequences.

George (1996: 248) tells us that life course scholars expect heteroge-neous life course patterns. The conceptual apparatus of agency is theirproered explanation for this heterogeneity. Why are life course patternsso variable within and between birth cohorts? The response from Elder andORand (1995: 459) is that environments do not have a uniform impact onthe lives of individuals who occupy them. It was, of course, Mead(1934: 25) who taught us that human self-consciousness is selective of cer-tain types of stimuli . . . [because] we open the door to certain stimuli andclose it to others. Elaborating on Meads insight, Elder and ORand(1995: 461) concur that the individual exercises some selection from hisor her environment. If choice and subjectivity matter, this suggests thatindividuals do not share a uniform environment. Elder and ORand(1995: 457, italics in original) conclude that the agency of individualsand their life choices ensures some degree of loose coupling between socialtransitions and stages. From this standpoint, agency is the wild card in thegame of life. Yet this line of reasoning brings us back to undoubtedly sim-plistic imagery: that the life course is a creation of the person (Clausen,1991: 805). Try telling that to a member of the Millennial Generation who islooking for a job.

Gecas (2003: 370) is quite right when he states that the self is at the heartof causal and agentic processes. All social action is agentically grounded inself-selected choices. Human conduct is deliberate, and our intentionsemerge from the internal dialogue that serves as a vehicle for self-conscious-ness. However, the self is not an uncaused cause; it is a product of socialinteraction and a thoroughly socialized entity. Like Clausen, Gecas (2003:374) shows us that ones capacity for agency or self-ecacy arises fromdevelopmental contexts, such as family, peers, school, occupation, race,



class, and gender. Agency is not a rare and always insurgent mode of action,nor does it only gure in social change. Garnkels (1967: 53) breachingexercises demonstrate that compliance with cultural norms is a form ofagency. Through socialized self-consciousness, the individual is motivatedto comply with folkways and mores. Agency is, therefore, part and parcel ofthe causal chain that brings about sociological determinism.

According to Shanahan (2000: 668), trends reveal signicant changes inthe transition to adulthood. Specically, there is growing heterogeneity. Lifecourse scholars theorize that agency is the source of this developmental vari-ability. Loose coupling reects the agency of individuals, writes Elder andORand (1995: 457). To substantiate this claim, one would have to show thatthere is more agency during a particular era than there was prior to it. Yet,given that agency is a universal feature of social interaction, how can there bemore (or less) of it during a specied historical period? And how can weaccount for social change (i.e. increased heterogeneity in the life course) bymeans of agency a phenomenon that is conditioned by its social context andserves as the foundation for compliance with the cultural status quo?

A small, isolated society with only primitive technology has very little lifecourse variability, but it has no less agency than we would nd in a moreadvanced society. Agency makes for compliance where options are few andrigidly enforced. If there is greater life course variability in recent decades, itis not the result of agency, per se, but rather structurally imposed changes insocial institutions that oer a broader range of life course options fromwhich to choose. The people in question are often reluctant to embracethese changes, and with good reason. In short, agency is neither a wildcard nor a ghost in the machine. It is an intrinsic component of that processwhereby culture is produced and reproduced across generations.

Methods

Agency operates within the context of social interaction, but how is itmanifest, and what dierence does it make? These are empirical questions,but where should we begin our inquiry? My recent research concerns tem-poral agency that is, eorts to modify or customize ones own experienceof time or that of others (Flaherty, 2011). I call such eort time work. Howdo people construct lines of activity or social occasions in order to instigateor suppress various forms of temporal experience? This question can onlybe addressed by means of rst-person narratives that describe cognitive andbehavioral eort at the micro-management of ones own temporalexperience.

With the aim of generating such narratives, I designed and supervisedsemi-structured, open-ended interviews with 406 people. These interviews

Flaherty 243


were conducted in two overlapping stages. From 1998 to 2001, my researchassistants and I interviewed 271 undergraduates who were enrolled in sec-tions of an introductory sociology course. These respondents came fromevery region of the US, but, as one would expect, they were quite homo-geneous in terms of age and socio-economic background. Consequently,from 2001 to 2004, we interviewed 135 people from all walks of life.Their occupations ranged from waitress to banker and from beautician toengineer. Of the total sample, 53.5% were women, and 12.6% were non-white. They ranged in age from 18 to 73.

Our interviews began with the following introduction: This study con-cerns ways in which people attempt to control or customize their ownexperience of time, or that of others. Is there any way in which you tryto inuence or manipulate the experience of time? This opening wasdesigned to make our respondents start thinking about time work certainly not a subject uppermost in their thoughts when the interviewbegan. Conrmation followed the interviewers recognition of a pertinent(but often tentative) response: Yes, thats what were looking for. Handingthe respondent a pad of paper, the interviewer then prompted writtenanswers to the following questions: Is there a particular time or dayduring which you nd yourself in this situation?; Would you describethe physical location of this situation?; Would you describe any relevantobjects?; Generally speaking, how would you describe the social situation?In other words, what is supposed to be happening?; Are there any otherpersons involved in this situation besides yourself? If so, please describethem, including your relationship; Now we would like you to describehow you control or customize the experience of time, and please be asspecic as possible. Finally, the interviewer recorded each respondentsage, gender, race, and occupation.

Our subjects reported eorts to modify multiple dimensions of time:duration, frequency, sequence, timing, and allocation. In addition, theyreport stealing time from others, most notably, their employers. Here, Idiscuss some of the principles that emerge from our ndings as well astheir implications for the image of agency in life course theory.

Time work in context

Collins (1992: 77) views agency as a gment of our imagination and point-edly rejects political revolutions as evidence of agency because, far frombeing miracles of indeterminism and free will, [they] are explicable bymacro-social conditions which are already well understood. Like somany others (including life course theorists), Collins mistakenly conatesagency with indeterminism, free will, and insurgency. In so doing, he



overlooks the most prevalent form of agency: conformity with culturalprescriptions. Consider the following instance. While spending a semesterabroad in Spain, a 22-year-old American student made it a point to accom-modate the unfamiliar schedule of her host, a 62-year-old woman: Everyday, we made sure that we were at home at 2:30 to eat the big meal of theday together. Her use of the plural we may seem odd in this extract, onlyone person is adapting to a foreign schedule but, in fact, she is quitecorrect. Both students and hosts compliance arise from comparable agen-tic eort. The student chooses to respect an exotic temporal norm; her hostchooses to enact conformity with a familiar temporal routine. At home orabroad, choosing to conform to normative expectations is most assuredlyan agentic practice.

Like the American student and her Spanish host, we often contribute to,and thereby help to maintain, temporal structures that confront us withexteriority and constraint indeed, the same structures we resist (via dif-ferent forms of time work) when the occasion suits us. Thompson (1967)has shown us that getting oneself to work on time could not be taken forgranted during the early years of the Industrial Revolution, and, despite thefact that workers have become habituated to this temporal regime, the sameis true today. Put dierently, whenever someone gets to work (or school, ordinner in a foreign land) on time, agency is implicated in that causal pro-cess. How does this occur? Should we say that the cause is someones deci-sion to set an alarm clock (i.e. intervention)? What about ones decision toforgo an interesting (but late) lm in order to ensure ones ability to get upin the morning (i.e. forbearance)? Is the cause located in that persons pri-mary socialization to the cultural value of punctuality? Or is it rooted infeelings of self-esteem, authenticity, and self-ecacy that ensue when oneshows up on time? Is it the feeling of superiority one has when contrastingoneself to a colleague who is chronically late? By means of a reexive self,the individual is engaged in agentic deliberations throughout this causalprocess, yet the upshot is an instance of conformity with temporal norms.Clearly, compliance is a rather large species of agency. There is, then, noreason to presume (in the manner of life course theorists) that agency is onlya force for divergence from the status quo. Both critics and advocates ofagency focus on resistance and insurrection, but, more often than not,agency makes for social order and cultural persistence.

How could it be otherwise? Agency is conditioned by its social context.Homeschooling, Lois (2010: 422) observes, is almost always performed byat-home mothers in two-parent, heterosexual families with a father servingas the single wage-earner in the paid labor force. Homeschooling is anagentic choice, but fathers do not choose this path despite expressingenthusiasm for the idea of homeschooling (Lois, 2010: 433). If, as

Flaherty 245


Collins would have it, agency is the shadow of free will, why do fathers notexercise their free will to stay at home and educate their children? Motherssolicit help with the homeschooling from fathers, but they reported thatfathers got too busy or forgot to honor their commitments (Lois,2010: 430). Faced with putting their own lives on hold for prolongedperiods (Lois, 2010: 433), these mothers turn to compensatory forms oftime work: sequencing and savoring. With sequencing, mothers devote thecurrent period of their lives to their children, but, as one puts it, There willbe time for me later (Lois, 2010: 434). With the second strategy savoring mothers dened the current period of their lives as one that deserves theirfull attention because Their childrens childhoods were evaporating daily,and they would regret not making the most of this time (Lois, 2010: 437).Homeschooling mothers are engaged in agentic practices, but, in eect,these practices reproduce a gendered social structure.

Let us consider another case in point this one from my own data. Twoyoung scholars one male, one female are visiting Miamis South Beachneighborhood on a crowded Saturday night. It takes nearly an hour forthem to nd a parking space. During this protracted interval, the femaledriver is described by her male companion as completely calm (in full Zenmode, to use her own words), while he is absolutely seething because hecant believe that it could take so long to park. How can their reactions tothe same setting be so divergent? They pay selective attention to dierentaspects of their shared environment. The female driver has the more chal-lenging role, but, unlike her male companion, she has mastered certaintechniques of time work. She knows how to conjure patience by divertingher attention away from time itself. This skill, which he lacks, is referencedby the slang, in full Zen mode. The machineries of time work are collect-ively available to the members of a society, but this knowledge is sociallydistributed. It is, of course, no coincidence that the female half of thiscouple is the calmer, more patient person. Like homeschooling, the relevantskills are not randomly distributed across sociological categories in thepopulation, nor can one simply summon patience at will.

Agency that is directed toward temporal deviance is no less conditionedby its social context. Hochschild and Machung (1989) conceptualized thesecond shift to help us see that women who participate in the paid laborforce, nonetheless, also assume responsibility for housekeeping and child-rearing with little or no help from the men in their lives. Parker-Pope andPope (1999: 7H) elaborate on this insight by observing that women actuallywork an additional Secret Shift a parallel workday in which womenmanage their family life at the same time they do the job for whichtheyre being paid. What we have here is the agentic theft of time. Thesewomen are on the clock, so, strictly speaking, they are choosing to divert



time from the work assigned to them by their employers. Yet this is not self-indulgent behavior. They are stealing from Peter to pay Paul; they reap-propriate time from one social role for the sake of another social role. Formany women, write Parker-Pope and Pope (1999: 7H), its the only waytheyre able to maintain the delicate balance between work and family. Inan ultimate sense, of course, this behavior is no more requisite than anyother, but responsibilities unrelated to their employment (responsibilitiesthey hold dear) will suer if they do not engage in this illicit and clandestineform of multitasking.

Clearly, this temporal deviance is an artifact of gender. A 23-year-oldwoman who works as a sta-service associate in a nancial rm notes thatshe must make personal appointments by phone at work. As she puts it,When you work nine to ve and so do most of the doctors and otherbusinesses, it becomes necessary to do this then. She is somewhat uncom-fortable with this confession (hence her use of the word necessary) adiscomfort that marks her own agentic complicity. Still, telephone calls ofthis type are only an issue for people who work in subordinate and super-vised positions, and, more often than not, these people are women. Thedemands of gainful employment are such that lower-level employees canelect to steal time from themselves. In this regard, the sta-service associateprovides further testimony.

I usually dont domuch eating at lunch. I am allowed a break from 12:00 to 1:00

p.m. and must be back for the others to take theirs. I usually go out and run

errands: groceries, a return at the mall, recycling, post oce. You name it, at

noon is usually when I do it! Technically, I guess that is not using work time

because that is my personal time, but I mention it because of an interesting

trend that I found: all of the sta-service associates and operations sta do

this . . .. The interesting thing is not that we are too busy to do this stu later

(most of the women in the oce have children at home), but that the nancial

advisors in the oce [all of whom are men] dont have a set time; they break at

any time of the day. They run errands at any time they feel like leaving. They

check out the new Home Depot that opened down the street at 2:30 in the

afternoon or go out to get a cinnamon bun and latte at 10:00 a.m.

Her astute observations point to a signicant, but typically overlooked,division in the US occupational structure: those who can mix personalwork (or play) with the demands of their job without getting into troublefor doing so and those who cannot. Both men and women engage in agency,and it would be dicult to say that there is more of it on one side or the other,but there is certainly a gendered distinction in the types of agency permittedthem.

Flaherty 247


Social interaction is saturated with temporal agency, but this time workis typically directed toward the self-regulation of temporal desires, notsomething that warrants the phrase free will. When we examine empiricalinstances of time work, we do not nd that the data are characterized byself-indulgence. On the contrary, it quickly becomes apparent that most ofour eorts to modify temporal experience emerge from and reect a socia-lized self-discipline. In the following excerpt from an interview with a29-year-old insurance salesman, our respondent describes engaging inagency by choosing to limit the amount of time he spends with his girl-friend, thereby striking a balance between the temporal demands of con-icting social roles:

I work all week and I like to have the nights to myself to do my work and rest.

My girlfriend would like to see me more often, but when shes around I cant

concentrate. So I tell her she can only come over on the weekends, which she

doesnt really like, but it has to be that way so I can get my work done. Id like

to see her more often, too, but its more convenient this way.

His claim that it has to be that way is nothing more than a cover story forambivalence. He wants to be a good boyfriend, and he wants to be a goodemployee, but both of these social roles require the allocation of temporalresources. He elects to ration time with his girlfriend as a solution for thistemporal quandary. This arrangement was not imposed on him; he created it.What is more, his temporal agency makes for her experience of temporalstructure, with its externality and constraint. He succeeds whereas she fails.

There is, then, the intriguing and uniquely human possibility that we maylook upon enjoyable conduct or experience as bad for us at least beyonda certain frequency. Lest we jump to a gendered conclusion, however, con-sider the following case, where a young woman rations time with her boy-friend for the sake of impression management:

I specically will not go places where I know he is at because I dont want him

to think Im some obsessed crazy girl who cant get enough of him. So I will

usually switch my plans or the order of them so I wont end up seeing him at

certain places when we dont plan to meet.

He is her boyfriend, and she enjoys his company, but she purposefullyrestricts her time with him. She does so in order to avoid being viewed asdeviant for the intensity of her aections. Social norms govern our intimaterelationships, and some of these norms concern the allocation of time. Thisyoung womans testimony shows us that one can spend too much time witha loved one becoming, thereby, a pitiable and perhaps frightening person



in the eyes of ones lover and peers. She eludes this fate by means of adroittime work (i.e. intermittent temporal abstinence).

When should I do something? For how long? One chooses what to dowith ones time, which entails the exercise of temporal agency, but thesedecisions are not made with utter autonomy. The individual in question is aproduct of a particular social location and, consequently, the allocation oftime reects cultural priorities. By dint of enculturation, many of us areoriented toward the asceticism or self-denial that makes for economic prod-uctivity. It follows that one must be on guard against losing track of timeduring enjoyable activity, as noted by a 22-year-old male:

When I walk my dog, I have a timer on my watch that counts down

10 minutes. I used to just glance at my watch, but I would end up spending

15 minutes out there. I take her out three times a day so, if I dont watch it,

I end up wasting my time.

The insurance salesman, the girlfriend, the young man who walks his dog,each of them makes a self-conscious decision; they engage in temporalagency. Yet the aim of this deliberate eort is restriction of the time theymight otherwise devote to activity they enjoy. Respectively, their timework arms social roles, social norms, and social values. Instead of self-indulgence, their agency celebrates the temporal structure of their society.

If we bear in mind that agency is conditioned by social forces, then it iseasier for us to understand why time work is so rarely capricious or insur-gent. There are, however, instances where an individual elects to toy withtemporal experience for self-indulgent reasons what I call time play. It isuseful to consider what one of these cases can teach us about the relation-ship between time and agency. In this excerpt, a 38-year-old social scientistrecalls her willful days as an undergraduate:

I used to reverse day and night by staying up all night talking to whomever

was around, wandering campus in the dark, reading, then going to class, if I

went that day, and then going back to the dorm to sleep. Id get up around

9:00 p.m., as things were getting socially interesting, and start over. This was

mostly as a result of nding daytime to be quite boring, and the reversal

provided some variety and better conversational partners.

Why are there so few cases like this one? Most of us are entangled in a webof social relationships that make temporal demands on our behavior. Weare not at liberty to toy with temporal experience in this fashion. And wheredo we nd this rare and unruly form of time play? Precisely in that stage ofthe life course where we should expect to nd it. During ones

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undergraduate studies, one enjoys a special societal license (almost a socialexpectation) for just this type of experimentation. Where else but as anundergraduate can you indulge in such temporal idiosyncrasy? Indeed,she would be quickly red from her current position were she to engagein anything like this conduct.

Like all forms of agency, time work is perspectival. Ones eort at tem-poral agency is often experienced by others as a bid for temporal determin-ism. The boss demands that employees work from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Thehostess for a sociable gathering invites her guests to arrive at 7:00 p.m.Parents tell their children to prepare for bedtime at 8:00 p.m. In each case,agentic deliberations and decisions precede attempts to dictate the temporalbehavior of others. Yet the others do not simply accede to these demands.Employees arrive late, take unscheduled breaks, pretend to work while doingpersonal business, and leave early. Some of those people invited to a sociablegathering deliberately procrastinate so that they can arrive fashionably lateor avoid awkward conversations with others who have arrived too early.And, of course, the parents attempt to impose a bedtime provokes angryprotests, tearful entreaties, and all manner of delaying tactics. In short,agentic eorts at temporal determinism serve as a springboard for temporalresistance and equally agentic forms of time work. There is, then, no cleanline between agency and determinism. What we nd instead is ceaselessinteraction, negotiation, and strategy.

If all social interaction is agentically guided, it follows that there cannotbe more or less agency during dierent stages of the life course, nor is theremore or less agency in dierent generations. To be sure, there is moretemporal agency due to time scarcity among the middle-aged, but moretemporal agency is occasioned by an overabundance of time amongyouth and the elderly. People of all ages strive to modify the same temporaldimensions of their lives: duration, frequency, sequence, timing, and allo-cation. While parents attempt to control when their children do homework,their children try to customize when they can meet with their friends. Whileparents steal time from their employers, their children steal time from theirteachers. In short, we nd small, predictable variations in the content oftime work across age categories, but no dierences with respect to thequantity or forms of time work. It is, therefore, dicult to see howagency can be used to explain a measurable increase (or decrease) in lifecourse heterogeneity during any particular era.

Conclusion

Time work is a form of agency. Through time work, we attempt to shapethe contours of our own temporal experience. By means of time work,



we resist external sources of temporal constraint or structure. These obser-vations have important implications for sociological theory. It is neces-sary, writes Bourdieu (1977 [1972]: 73), to abandon all theories whichexplicitly or implicitly treat practice as a mechanical reaction, directly deter-mined by the antecedent conditions. Indeed, evidence from the study oftime work makes it apparent that the intricacies of temporal creativitycannot be accurately represented by mechanistic determinism.

We do not allow time to simply happen upon us, yet much of the externalconstraint and structure that we resist via time work has its origins in ourown humanly produced forms of temporal creativity. We cannot wish thesetemporal structures away, as the French Republicans and Soviet Bolsheviksdiscovered when, 140 years apart, they each failed to overthrow the seven-day week (Zerubavel, 1985: 35). This is why rejection of mechanistic the-ories in no way implies that . . .we should bestow on some creative free willthe free and willful power to constitute . . . the meaning of the situation(Bourdieu, 1977 [1972]: 73). Sociological theory must recognize thedialectical character of our temporal experience without dening the selfas an autonomous sovereign or depicting time as the plaything of ourdesires.

There are temporal norms in every society. As cultural conventions, theyoriginate in human improvisation and enterprise. Citizens are not requiredto uphold them, although there may be consequences when they fail to doso. The fact that, by and large, they choose to do so (and they must chooseto do so) is an artifact of socialization in concert with other mechanisms ofsocial control. Temporal norms make for motivated compliance with thetemporal status quo, but this motivated compliance is, and must be, ongo-ingly realized through self-guided decisions and practices. The citizens of agiven society are only trying to enact an elusive image of themselves as goodpeople people who do what is expected of them. In so doing, however,they recapitulate the temporal structure of their society and achieve a eet-ing sense of self-esteem in the bargain. By electing to conform to temporalnorms, they reproduce the objective conditions of time as it is understood inthat society. Thus, the study of time work provides an empirical foundationfor the reintegration of subjective voluntarism and objective constraint(Berger, 1991: 4).

Agency often involves choosing to comply with mores and folkways. Itis conditioned by its cultural context and serves to reproduce social struc-ture. Agency sometimes makes for temporal deviance, but, in theseinstances, it is no less conditioned by its social context. It is, consequently,rarely capricious or insurgent. Agency is perspectival in that ones eortat self-determination can be viewed as a deterministic move from thestandpoint of another. All social interaction is agentically guided, but

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agency is not antithetical to causality and sociological determinism. By thesame token, we cannot marginalize agency in the remote realms of unex-plained variance and insurrection. Agency is embedded within the causalchain of sociological determinism as a necessary, if deliberate and ultim-ately indeterminate, link. This is what agency looks like when you exam-ine it closely, and life course scholars must come to terms with thesendings if they want to incorporate this concept into their theoreticalframework.

Acknowledgments

I thank Hartmut Rosa and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful commentsduring the editorial process. I am grateful for the assistance of Linda F. OBryant.I also thank Herwig Reiter, Nadine Schoneck-Voss, and Benedikt Rogge for the

opportunity to participate in their symposium, Times of Life in Times of Change,at the Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst, Germany, where I read anearlier version of this article.

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