The Temporal Order: Social Roles, Time, and Purpose

• In Event: Ethnographic Approaches to Social Psychology

Abstract

There is a normative time and place for everything—including our social roles. As individuals move throughout the world, they activate the roles that are the most salient to their given situation. So tightly bonded are perceptions of place-time and role performance that the usual flow of role enactment in place and time provides a sense of movement through social life and establishes purpose: the socially derived sense that one’s actions are useful and valuable because they contribute to one’s social connectedness and/or build towards goals. It is the organizing of social roles in time, what we call a temporal order, that routinizes social life, tethering us to when and where in meaningful ways. So, what happens when the usual flow of role enactment in place-time is disrupted?

In this study, we theorize the effects of changes to temporal orders and argue that severe disruptions to our temporal orders can contribute to a sense of purposelessness. The speed, character, and magnitude of the change matter: when a valuable role is suddenly and forcefully stripped away, people are at a high risk for experiencing purposelessness. We include data from two studies at opposite ends of the criminal legal system. One is an ethnographic examination of life in southern California county jails primarily from the viewpoint of penal residents. The other is a mix of participant observations and semi-structured interviews with law enforcement personnel from an agency in a large midwestern state. By examining involuntary changes to the temporal orders of penal residents along with a typified temporal order of law enforcement, we mobilize our data towards a formal and more robust set of principles that incorporate the social use of time in role theory.

Authors

• Mallory Grace Harrington, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

• Michael Lawrence Walker, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities