Research: WR152: Time, Tempo and Power in American Culture: Argument & Method

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About Time by Tim Aldrich (Editor) Where does all the time go? Despite the burgeoning army of machines designed to save us time - from cars and aeroplanes to dishwashers and microwaves - we don't seem to have any more of it on our hands. We simply fill the space we clear with more things to do - consuming more, spending more - and then look around for new ways of saving time. And so we spiral onwards, upwards, ever faster. Being busy has become a habit, and a habit that gives us high status - busy people are important people. The business of business is busy-ness. We are moving from a world in which the big eats the small, to a world where the fast eats the slow. But the fallout from a society hooked on speed is everywhere. It's affecting our health: 60 per cent of the adult population in the UK report that they suffer from stress, and more than half of these say that this has worsened over the last 12 months. It's affecting our family life, with a quarter of British families sharing a meal together only once a month. And it affects our environment too: air travel is a major source of carbon dioxide emissions, accelerating climate change as we speed around the world. And the faster we live, the faster we consume, the faster we waste energy and the faster we pollute the planet. The faster we seem to be running out of time. Is there something fundamentally wrong with the structure and values of this high-speed society? What are we running from and what are we running towards? Sustainable development is all about time. It's about trying to safeguard the health of the planet, and the people it supports, indefinitely, unconstrained by time. The idea of time offers a novel perspective on what sustainable development is all about. Looking at issues affecting society and the environment through the prism of time conveys the urgency of the challenge and leads us to solutions we might not have thought of before. About Time, edited by the think-tank Forum for the Future, brings together ten of the world's leading thinkers and writers, including Will Hutton, Baroness Mary Warnock, Sir Martin Rees, Ghillean Prance, Jay Griffiths (the author of the bestselling Pip Pip) and Jonathon Porritt, from disciplines including biology, business, sociology, ethnography, astronomy, philosophy, politics, history and sustainability in a collection of intriguing essays exploring the issue of time and how it relates to the environment, economy and society. The first half of this collection looks at different dimensions of time - from the history of time as a social phenomenon and cultural notions of time, to cosmological time and the difference between human and machine time. These "think-pieces" are followed by a series of more practical, solutions-oriented contributions, looking at how we deal with time in different contexts - from the slow food movement and time banks to long-term thinking in politics and what we can individually do to cope with the speed society. Contributions are liberally interspersed with boxes and brief pieces offering bite-sized facts, figures and insights relating to time and our everyday lives. About Time is a high-profile collection aimed at creating debate about where the values of our contemporary society are taking us. It will foster reflective thinking about different aspects of time, using the concept of time to communicate and illuminate the idea of sustainable development and question our idolatry of speed. In doing so, it aims to inspire and help decision-makers in business, government and elsewhere to appreciate the challenges of sustainable development, and inspire individuals to create change in their own lives. For readers of No Logo and Longitude, this book provides a thought-provoking twist, bringing together time and sustainability in a refreshing, provocative and accessible way.
Publication Date: 2005
Speeding up Fast Capitalism: Cultures, Jobs, Families, Schools, Bodies by Ben Agger In his 1989 book, Fast Capitalism, Ben Agger presented a framework for understanding late-20th century social problems. Speeding Up Fast Capitalism, a sequel to his earlier book, assesses social changes since the end of the 1980s brought about by information technologies like the Internet, which have quickened the pace of everyday life. In Speeding Up Fast Capitalism, Agger assesses the impact of the Internet on consciousness, communication, culture and community, and evaluates the prospects of democratic social change. Where the earlier book was largely theoretical, Speeding Up applies critical theory to specific topics such as Internet culture, work, families, childhood, schooling, food, the body and fitness. Although indebted to Fast Capitalism, the sequel appeals to an audience wider than theorists, including empirical sociologists, social scientists and scholars in cultural disciplines.
Publication Date: 2015
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell ** A New York Times Bestseller ** NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Time * The New Yorker * NPR * GQ * Elle * Vulture * Fortune * Boing Boing * The Irish Times * The New York Public Library * The Brooklyn Public Library "A complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto."--Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times Book Review One of President Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of 2019" Porchlight's Personal Development & Human Behavior Book of the Year In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives. Odell sees our attention as the most precious--and overdrawn--resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important ... but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind's role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress. Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book will change how you see your place in our world.
Publication Date: 2019
American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century by Martin Halliwell (Editor); Catherine Morley (Editor) Will the twenty-first century be the next American Century? Will American power and ideas dominate the globe in the coming years? Or is the prestige of the United States likely to crumble beneath the pressure of new international challenges?This ground-breaking book explores the changing patterns of American thought and culture at the dawn of the new millennium, when the world's richest nation has never been more powerful or more controversial. It brings together some of the most eminent North American and European thinkers to investigate the crucial issues and challenges facing the United States during the early years of our new century.From the subterranean political shifts beneath the electoral landscape to the latest biomedical advances, from the literary response to 9/11 to the rise of reality television, this book explores the political, social and cultural contours of contemporary American life - but it also places the United States within a global narrative of commerce, cultural exchange, international diplomacy, ideological conflict and war. These eighteen new essays address such pressing issues as leadership, foreign policy, propaganda, religion, health, technology, immigration, 9/11 culture and digital media. Searching for the roots of our contemporary concerns, the authors look back to the Clinton years and even earlier periods of twentieth-century American life. But they also look forward to the new horizons of the century to come - to the unanticipated dangers of a global future and to the soaring possibilities of American enterprise and imagination.
Publication Date: 2008
Life Out of Whack by Les Essif A Life Out of Whack has two parts. The first part is autobiographical and sketches the atypical early life of a future academic scholar from family poverty to marriage and divorce at nineteen, from eight years in big-city and federal law enforcement to starting college at the age of twenty-six, culminating with a doctoral fellowship in French Studies at Brown U. The second part presents an alternative critical look at contemporary life and ethos: aging, nature, corporate capitalism, and American, French, and global cultures.
Publication Date: 2018
Time, Capitalism and Alienation : a socio-historical inquiry into the making of modern time by Martineau, Jonathan "In Time, Capitalism and Alienation. A Socio-Historical Inquiry into the Making of Modern Time, Jonathan Martineau offers an account of the histories of social time in Europe, from the innovation of the clock around 1300 to the making of World Standard Time around the turn of the twentieth century. Approaching 'time' as a social phenomenon traversed by various power and property relations, this work provides a socio-theoretical and historical analysis of the relationship between clock-time and capitalist social relations, problematizing the rise to hegemony of a clock-time regime harnessing various social temporalities to the purpose of capitalist development. This book sheds light on the alienating tendencies of the modern temporal regime and the relationship between time and modern economic development."
Publication Date: 2015
Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality by K. Birth This is a book about time, but it is also about much more than time--it is about how the objects we use to think about time shape our thoughts. Because time ties together so many aspects of our lives, this book is able to explore the nexus of objects, cognition, culture, and even biology, and to do so in relationship to globalization.
Publication Date: 2012
American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears by Farah Stockman "Shannon, Wally, and John built their lives around their place of work. Shannon, a white single mother, became the first woman to run the factory's dangerous furnaces at the Rexnord manufacturing plant in Indianapolis and was proud of producing one of the world's top brands of steel bearings. Wally, a black man known for his initiative and kindness, was promoted to become chairman of efficiency, one of the most coveted posts on the factory floor, and dreamed of starting his own barbecue business one day. John, a white machine operator, came from a multigenerational union family and clashed with a work environment that was increasingly hostile to organized labor. The Rexnord factory had served as one of the economic engines for the surrounding community. When the factory closed, hundreds of people lost their jobs. What had life been like for Shannon, Wally, and John, before the factory closed? And what became of them after the factory moved to Mexico and Texas? American Made is a story about people and a community struggling to reinvent itself. It is also a story about race, class, and American values, and how jobs serve as a bedrock of people's lives and drive powerful social justice movements. This revealing book is also about this political moment, when joblessness and uncertainty about the future of work have made themselves heard at a national level. Most of all it is a story about people: who we consider to be one of us, and how the dignity of work lies at the heart of who we are"
Publication Date: 2021
American Capitalism : New Histories by Edited by: Sven Beckert and Christine Desan "American Capitalism presents a sampling of cutting-edge research from prominent scholars. These broad-minded and rigorous essays venture new angles on finance, debt, and credit; women’s rights; slavery and political economy; the racialization of capitalism; labor beyond industrial wage workers; and the production of knowledge, including the idea of the economy, among other topics. Together, the essays suggest emerging themes in the field: a fascination with capitalism as it is made by political authority, how it is claimed and contested by participants, how it spreads across the globe, and how it can be reconceptualized without being universalized. A major statement for a wide-open field, this book demonstrates the breadth and scope of the work that the history of capitalism can provoke."
Publication Date: 2018