Globalization and the “Temporal Turn”: Recent Trends and Issues in Time Studies

Since at least the early 1990s there has occurred what might be termed a “temporal turn” within much of the social sciences and humanities. This was in some ways a reaction to an earlier turn that emanated from the late- 1970s-the “spatial turn,” in which the processes of globalization were analyzed in largely spatial terms by an influential group of social geographers. The new emphasis on the nature of temporality was seen by many of its practitioners as a rebalancing of what had become an out-of-kilter space-time equation within the academe. Notwithstanding the tremendous contribution made by an emergent school of time scholars, the objective of the new focus on time needs to serve as a complement to the indissolubility of space-time as an immensely rich perspective through which to understand the dynamics of the economy, society, and the subjectively lived life.