The Rise of the Clock: Time Discipline and Consumer Culture

Abstract

The clock has come to dominate understandings of time. As a mechanism for measuring, planning and coordinating activities, people and the circulation of goods, the clock has come to frame how we understand and experience time. This chapter reviews how clock time became standardized and, in the process, a means of regulating, coordinating, synchronizing and increasing social and economic activity. Presenting time as objective (in the form of hours and minutes), the clock became a disciplining device, instilling the importance of punctuality, increased productivity per ‘unit of time’ and a means of coordinating the times when people perform different activities. As an objective unit, time became commodified—a resource to be valued and exchanged or negotiated over. Time discipline and ‘consciousness’ came to infuse all aspects of everyday life, including leisure and consumption which both became more ‘time-consuming’ with the onset of mass production techniques. The rise of consumer culture in the post-Second World War period was accompanied with the emergence of a time squeeze characterized by working more in order to consume more.