Approaches to time in social theory can be broadly divided into four categories. The first includes theories that examine society and culture synchronically—that is, by analyzing social structures and relationships as they exist at a particular moment in time. Examples include the anthropological structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the early structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons, the anthropological functionalism of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronisław Malinowski, as well as Actor-network theory.

The second category consists of theories that focus on social change, development, sequences, rhythms, and cycles within society, while still treating time itself as a fixed and continuous flow.

The third category includes theories that regard time as socially constructed and relative. However, in these approaches, time is generally considered only as a secondary element within broader theories of other social phenomena. These types of theories are called „corollary theories of time”.

The fourth category encompasses the work of thinkers who explicitly attempt to develop a distinct “sociology of time” as a central field of analysis. Perspectives within the “sociology of time” seek to define the concept of social time, identify different patterns of temporal order and regularity, examine the multiple forms of temporality linked to various types of social organization, and explain how experiences and structures of time differ across cultures and historical periods.

In this article, we will take a closer look at the second, third, and fourth social theories in their relation to time.

                                Theories of Social Change

There is a lot of variety between different theories of social change. Social historians and historical sociologists usually study changes in some aspect of social life, either as continuous development or as a sudden rupture in continuity. Theories of socio-cultural evolution most often propose the existence of several stages of development that every society has to go through on its path from the most primitive level to the highest and most complex level. Cyclical theories most often study the start, development, and decline of great civilizations. In these theories, every civilization has to go through the same stages, but at the end of the “life cycle,” civilizations stop existing, thus completing their life cycle. Theories of generational change argue that people born within a particular period, typically spanning 15 to 20 years, can be understood as belonging to the same generation. This perspective originated with Karl Mannheim, who, in his essay The Problem of Generations (1952), introduced the idea that time shapes both identity and social location, and that generations function as forms of collective identity.

While former theories study macro changes, theories that study life course (life cycle) use a micro approach to examine how society influences the changes that happen over the course of an individual’s life. Life cycle theories describe human development through stages such as birth, maturity, and death, using these phases as temporal metaphors to interpret, explain, and predict changes in everyday life. The sequence of age-related social roles creates biographical pathways and socially organized timetables for individuals. Within family life, for example, societies often establish normative expectations regarding the “appropriate” timing for events such as the duration of courtship, marriage, and the transition to parenthood. There are also socially accepted patterns for coordinating the sequencing of different life roles.

                     The Corollary Theories of Time

David Harvey, in his book The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), explores the consequences of the development of postfordism and new information technologies on the economy and culture. Postfordism has led to the flexibility of work, which is characterized by lower employment permanence, an increase in temporary and part-time jobs, a reduction in labor rights and benefits, and a reduction in the chances of obtaining pension and health insurance. Labor flexibility is associated with flexible accumulation - high structural unemployment, a large service sector, halting wage growth, and declining size and union influence. Flexible accumulation has led to what Harvey calls "space-time compression". This phrase signifies the change – reduced total cycle time of financial capital accumulation on a global scale, made possible by new communication and information technologies.

Postfordist labor relations and new technologies have enabled capital to make and implement investment and business decisions around the planet in a very short time. Capital can now produce specific products, coordinate diversified investments, reduce production and delivery times, and employ workers in flexible positions in the short term and globally. The computerization of financial markets and businesses, and the increased flow of information, money, goods, and people at the transnational level, are creating a global market for money, goods, and labor.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Marshall McLuhan studies how the printing press and printed books and press rearranged the culture, consciousness, and sensibilities after the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg. This book introduced two new concepts – “global village”. Global village refers to the time and space distances losing their significance due to the development and spread of printing technology. This new technology allowed for mass communication that shaped contemporary culture and created a village-like mindset all over the world.  

In the book Phenomenology of the Social World (1932), Alfred Schütz wanted to resolve the inconsistencies of Weber's use of "subjective meaning" and to further develop his methods of "understanding" (Verstehen) and ideal types. Schütz used Bergson's analysis of "duration", as a stream of conscious experience that represents the link between subjective and objective knowledge, Husserl's analysis of "internal time-consciousness" (inneren Zeitbewusstseins), and a similar concept of "stream of consciousness", which was introduced by William James, as a basis for elaborating Weber's most important concepts, and above all, the concept of subjective meaning.

Schütz states that subjective meaning grows through the unification of a constant flow of different feelings and reactions to those feelings into different types of experience. Through reflection, anticipation, and interpretation, people reconstruct experiences and classify different phenomena into different types, based on their own typologies. A key aspect of our understanding, awareness, and reconstruction of experience is the temporal dimension because meaning always arises retrospectively in relation to the moment when what is perceived has happened. People even think of future actions as already completed activities. Subjective meaning is related to the flow of mental experience and its relationship to three time periods: 1) the vivid present - the present moment; 2) past experiences that appear as memory and recollection, and 3) anticipating and imagining future states and activities. Meaning is located in specific acts of consciousness itself and the emotions associated with them. The meaning that an actor gives to his own action depends on the time distance from those activities, because the actor, since the action has already ended, reacts to the changes that his action has caused in the structures of meaning.

Schütz argues that the social world is organized through temporal relationships. He first distinguishes between temporally inaccessible people—such as predecessors from the past and successors in the future—and those who are temporally accessible to us in the present. Among those who share our time, those who are physically present and directly accessible, he calls consociates. According to Schütz, the deepest form of social interaction becomes possible with consociates through what he terms the “We-relation.” In this relationship, individuals experience a shared flow of inner time, effectively “growing older together” through direct mutual engagement. Beyond ordinary everyday consciousness, Schütz also develops the idea of “multiple realities,” which include spheres such as fantasy, dreams, and scientific thought. Each of these realities possesses its own unique mode or “temporal style,” shaping how time is experienced and understood within that particular realm.

Alvin Toffler, in Future Shock (1970), introduced the concept of „future shock“, which refers to the psychological state of disorientation and stress that people and societies experience when radical changes occur in a short period. Toffler believes that people have a limited ability to adapt to social and technological transformations, so the speed of change is the one that causes the greatest negative psychological consequences, and not the direction or orientation of the change. The future shock will only increase over time, as technological and social changes will be even more drastic. The consequences of this process are many: changes in interpersonal relations, increased individual and collective mobility, increased social stratification and diversity, increased consumption of new goods, and the like. He believed that societies must actively manage these changes because they are taking place at such a speed that individuals and societies cannot manage to adapt to them.

Ferdinand Braudel's great study The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vol. (1949), introduces the notion of multiple social temporalities. According to the author, there are three types of temporality: "structure" (which lasts the longest), "cycle" (which are of medium duration), and "events" (of the shortest duration). The study of structures is paramount in history. Although the structures are quite stable and long-lasting, they go through different economic and demographic cycles, so it is important to study them to better understand specific events.

In the book The Historian’s Craft (1953), Marc Bloch presents history as ‘the science of men in time’, an interdisciplinary field that is part science, part craft, and part art. All of history should be seen as one single entity and can't be compartmentalized. All historical periods and all aspects of social life are interrelated and connected. Focus should be on people's beliefs and customs, and not on individual political events.

Mircea Eliade, in the books The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954) and The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (1959a), claims that the source of religion is a yearning for an encounter with God. What is „sacred“ are places and times that religion provides to the believer so she or he can have an encounter with God. God is more likely to appear where it appeared before, and that's why, even if a god is omnipresent, believers will go to the religious site to seek out God. Cosmogonies or myths of creation are specifically important because God was closest to people during or after creation. A widely shared myth across cultures suggests that the world repeatedly undergoes cycles of destruction followed by renewal and rebirth. These myths serve to transport believers to the time of the creation so they can be close to God.

Anthony Giddens, in his structuration theory, proposes a very different conception of structure. He believes that structure should be understood as abstract models that exist as "virtual" because they exist "outside of time and space" and are "subject-less" and represent, most often, unconscious products of the reproduction of human practice. Giddens views both the structures and actions of actors as two sides of the same coin, which are connected through social practices. Long-term reproduction of similar forms of practice leads to the creation of stable patterns of events and lasting collectives that retain their structural features in the long run. When there is a transformation of social practices, then there is the establishment of new patterns of events and enduring collectives. Except in periods of great social transformation, most social practices routinely take place. Routine behavior occurs within "circuits of reproduction", which can take place within interpersonal encounters or through distance communication, through space and time. Acceleration of communication through spatial and temporal distance is the basis of Giddens' concept of "time-space distanciation" of social systems.

Anthony Giddens argues that social life—ranging from the reflexive self to long-lasting social institutions—is both shaped by and actively shapes social temporality. He identifies three interconnected dimensions of time that are central to this process. The first is the temporality of Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, referring to the fundamental and finite experience of being that underlies human existence. The second is durée, the lived time of everyday intentional activity and ongoing experience. The third is longue durée, which concerns the extended temporal continuity of institutions and social structures. According to Giddens, these forms of time do not exist in a hierarchical order where one simply builds upon another. Instead, they continually interact and shape each other simultaneously, so that even ordinary routines involve all three temporal dimensions at once.

For Giddens, modernity emerged through the growing ability of historical narratives to encourage reflexive examination of customs and traditions. Existing social arrangements of time and space became subject to critical scrutiny rather than unquestioned acceptance. In this context, the future increasingly detached itself from the authority of the past, and innovation itself became normalized as a routine aspect of social life. Giddens argues that contemporary society should not be understood as a complete break from modernity, but rather as a transformation into what he calls “late modernity” or a “post-traditional society.”

E. P. Thompson, in the essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and  Industrial Capitalism” (1967), studies the rationalization of labor and work-time in the eighteenth century. He claims that the transition from pre-industrial society to industrial capitalism fundamentally altered human perceptions, measurements, and uses of time. Time and labor used to be connected to human rhythms and natural processes but industrialization and capitalism made them (time and labor) to conform to abstract timetables and working hours. Transition of time to a strictly structured, synchronized economic commodity was used to discipline labor. In preindustrial times, "task-orientation" was dominant, and meant that work and life were integrated, and the division between "work" and "leisure" was highly fluid. Under industrial capitalism, time became measured rigidly by the clock. Labor became synchronized around a synchronized schedule to maximize the efficiency of expensive factory machinery. Capitalism changed time from something that is "passed" or lived into something that is spent, saved, wasted, or sold. Employers began purchasing a worker's time rather than the completed task itself, turning time into a currency. The transition to clock time was not immediate or peaceful. Workers resisted the relentless, monotonous discipline of the factory floor. Thompson highlights early labor patterns like "Saint Monday"—the traditional custom where artisan workers took Mondays (and sometimes Tuesdays) off to recover from weekend drinking or to enjoy personal leisure, compressing a week's worth of work into intense bursts at the end of the week. To break these irregular habits and enforce a steady labor output, the capitalist class deployed a combination of mechanisms: heavy fines for tardiness or missing shifts; the proliferation of clocks, factory bells, and pocket watches to monitor people at a granular level; moral and religious conditioning (the teaching of time-thrift in schools and Methodist chapels, framing idleness and a lack of punctuality as sins); and the internalization of time -  instead of fighting against clock time itself, the labor movement shifted to fighting over time, with the demands for shorter working days, structured overtime pay, and regulated vacation time.

                                      Sociology of Time

Anthropologists were the first to notice that the social sense of time and its passing is a cultural construct. For example, in small and homogenous groups, such as Hopi-speaking Pueblo Native Americans, there is very undeveloped temporal precision. Hopi language has no past, present, or future tenses, and their conception of time is as unique instants rather than sequential cumulative events.

Émile Durkheim is widely regarded as a founding figure in the sociology of time. In his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim argues that fundamental categories of thought—such as time, space, classification, and causality—originate in society rather than in innate mental structures. Durkheim positions social reality between the empiricist view of the mind as a blank slate and the a priori notion of the mind as preconfigured.

While Durkheim recognizes that individuals experience time subjectively, he argues that time is essentially collective rather than individual. The structures through which people organize temporal experience arise from shared social life. As Durkheim explains, calendars reflect the rhythm of collective activities and help maintain their regularity; therefore, the category of time represents a form of shared or social time and functions as a social institution. Durkheim further maintains that concepts such as time, space, and causality are collective representations that provide the foundational framework for human thought. He describes time as an ordered sequence of experiences that differentiates past, present, and future. These sequences may take cyclical forms, such as the changing seasons, linear forms, such as the progression from birth to death, or even open-ended forms.

Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, both Durkheim's collaborators, published the book Sacrifice and Its Function (1899). They view sacrifice as a religious act in which the victim, the one who sacrifices, and all the objects used in the ritual, have a sacred status. Sacrifice is not a simple act of appeasing sacred forces; instead, the essence of sacrifice is the ritual transformation of the persons participating in the ritual. The victim has the role of mediator between the profane and the sacral sphere, so through sacrifice, the connection of these two spheres is realized. Since the sphere of the sacred is separated and forbidden, sacrifice is necessary for communication between the two spheres to be realized safely. The ritual of sacrifice itself has its time phases - preparing the sacrifice, initiatory rituals, actual sacrifice, consuming the sacrifice afterward - but it also has a spatial organization - concentric circles corresponding to different levels of sacredness, while at the center are the victim and the person performing the sacrifice. Mauss and Hubert showed that time derives its meaning from society, and that some time periods, depending on the social situation, are more important than others of equal length.

Sorokin and Robert Merton, in „Social time: a methodological and functional analysis” (1937), argue that social time is not merely different from astronomical time but that it admits of many variants—social time varies qualitatively across social space. Different calendars, systems of time reckoning, and meanings of temporality are to be expected in different societies, locations within societies, and even in association with different activities.

In his book The Spectrum of Social Time (1964), Georges Gurvitch deals with the sociology of time by studying the hierarchical arrangement of social time. Each social time can be described by several dimensions: the specific form of manifestation of sociability and the level of the community; types of groups that use some time; the level of continuity and discontinuity in time itself; and the level of contingency and certainty of time. He singles out eight different types of social time; 1) “Enduring time” – time of everyday life in family or community; 2) “Deceptive time” – time of daily routine; 3);  “Erratic time” – irregular life of history and events 4) “Cyclical time” – time of recurring events; 5) “Retarded time” – time of symbols and institutions that are anchored in history; 6) “alternating time” – time of rules; 7) “Pushing forward time” – time that is used to create change; and 8) “explosive time” – time of collective creation and revolutions.  

Eviatar Zerubavel is known for his sociological study of time in the works Patterns of Time in Hospital Life (1979), Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (1981), „The Standardization of Time: A Sociohistorical Perspective”, in American Journal of Sociology  (1982), and The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week (1985). Researching the organization of time in hospitals, calendars, and diaries, the division of time into months and weeks, he concluded that there is a social basis for time or temporal patterns. Society seeks to exert control over the duration, temporal location, succession, and uniformity of occurrence of social activities. This tendency produces a specific "sociotemporal order" that is different from biological or physical time patterns.

Zerubavel singles out four types of socio-temporal conventional regularities: 1) sequential structure - the correct chronological order of activities; 2) duration - how long some activities should last; 3) temporal location - what needs to be done at what time (diaries); 4) rates of recurrence - how often some activities are performed. All these forms of socio-temporal order have their normative and prescriptive side and they all form part of the organization of the whole society. In different societies, but also in the same society in different historical periods, there are different time categories, and changes in time categories directly depend on broader social changes.

Joffre Dumazedier studied all types of leisure activities from a socio-historical perspective. He saw the rise of time and type of leisure activities as part of a historical and evolutionary trend in which time dedicated to work shrank from an average of 4,000 hours of work a year in pre-modern times to 1,600 in the second half of the twentieth century. This excess free time allowed people to enjoy engaging in sports and other types of leisure activities. In The Cultural Revolution of Free Time, 1968–88 (1988), Dumazedier introduced the concept of so-called ipsative social time (temps social ipsatif), defined as liberated time claimed by individuals and used for their personal development. Overall, Dumazedier viewed the expansion of leisure as a defining feature of modernity, which he analyzed through a post-Marxist theory of social time.

Michael Dunlop Young, in The Metronomic Society: Natural Rhythms and Human Timetables (1988); explores the tension between cyclical time (the recurring rhythms of nature and human biology) and linear time (the artificial, forward-marching progress of industrialized societies). He argues that modern civilization has shifted away from a sun-centered, natural rhythm to a rigid, clock-regulated, "metronomic" schedule. This artificial pacing shapes everything from daily social behavior to institutional structures. Human societies have increasingly replaced flexible, organic rhythms with precise mechanical timekeepers, leading to a highly synchronized but rigid social structure. Young analyzes how repetition, habit, and social customs serve as the stabilizing "glue" of social evolution. He argues that social structure is sustained by these predictable loops. To explain how human timetables interact with the world, Young bridges sociology with insights from evolutionary biology, chronobiology, molecular biology, history, and philosophy. The book highlights the psychological and cultural friction that occurs when humans try to force inherently cyclical biological needs (like sleep and seasonal shifts) into strict, linear economic demands.

In Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (1992), Henri Lefebvre explores how biological, psychological, and social rhythms shape everyday life. He argues that space and time must be understood together rather than separately, with rhythm serving as a key analytical concept grounded in repetition and movement. Lefebvre examines rhythms in cities, bodies, media, politics, and music, emphasizing the interaction between natural and social timescales. Central to his analysis is the body, particularly under capitalism, where everyday experiences reveal tensions between abstract social structures and concrete lived realities. Through rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre proposes a new way of understanding social life and human experience.

Norbert Elias argues in his process sociology that as societies become more complex, they require increasingly sophisticated forms of coordination. Over generations, people therefore develop enhanced abilities to symbolize time and use it as a means of social orientation. In his work An Essay on Time (2007), Elias contends that what humans call “time” is neither an innate property of the mind nor an inherent feature of nature itself. Instead, time is a human creation that emerges through processes of social development and collective synthesis. According to Elias, the meaning and experience of time can only be understood in relation to the historical evolution of societies.

Elias also explores how conceptions of time have changed from early societies to modern ones by examining a broad range of cultures at different stages of development. He connects these transformations to a broader movement from “involvement” toward greater “detachment” in human understanding and social organization. The long and gradual formation of the European calendar over centuries serves as a key example of his developmental approach to sociology.

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     -     Fighting for Time: Shifting Boundaries of Work and Social Life (2004);

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     -     „The Standardization of Time: A Sociohistorical Perspective”, in American Journal of Sociology  (1982);

     -     The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week (1985);

     -     Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (2003).