Usable Social Science

1. Space and Time: Constraints and Opportunities

15 We focus first on two omnipresent dimensions of human life: space and time. Their very pervasiveness, however, sometimes renders their precise influence elusive. it is not common to find them as chapter headings in books such as this one. Therefore, our gathering of knowledge under these headings as organizing principles for usable knowledge is unorthodox and sometimes speculative, but also, we hope, novel at times. PeCUliaR featUR eS of SPaCe aND tiMe We notice initially an apparent paradox. time and space can be regarded as both universal and unyielding but at the same time manipulable by humans and therefore culturally and socially variable. They are universal in that both have to be confronted as existential conditions of life. all actions occur in space, and space is forever an obstacle to complete freedom of movement. The same can be said of time. furthermore, the rhythms of nature (diurnal, seasonal, annual) and body processes (e.g., menstruation, reproduction, generations, life-cycle regularities , and death) impose themselves (Silverman, 2001). yet there is enormous personal, social, and cultural variation in representing both space and time, as anthropologists and others have demonstrated (levinson, 2001; Gell, 1992). Both are also objects of endless symbolization, as revealed in expressions such as social time, political time, ritual time, geographic space, social space, personal space, and symbolic space. it is essential to keep this double aspect of universality and variability in mind. Space and time are represented differently in the social-science disciplines. 1 Space and time Constraints and Opportunities 16 Arenas of Usability Geography is most explicit in its incorporation of space; place arrangements, distribution of populations, and movement in and constraints of space have been at the center of that discipline (e.g., Pred, 1973). Urban studies, planning, architecture, and design deal explicitly with spatial arrangements, as does social ecology. even though much of neoclassical equilibrium theory is presented as “timeless” (vickers, 1994), economists explicitly refer to time in discussing topics such as interest, investment, inventory cycles, business cycles, and economic growth, and consider space in the analysis of markets and location theory. Sociologists acknowledge a sociology of time, and a few write about it (Sorokin, 1943; Gurvitch, 1964; Zerubavel, 1981). anthropologists have analyzed the centrality of time in political contestation and the exercise of power (Rutz, 1992), as well as the apparently universal relationship between space and a sense of belonging (lovell, 1998). Psychologists write on how individuals organize their own sense of space (eliot, 1987), on neuropsychological mechanisms involved in temporal processing (Pastor and artieda, 1996), and on ways of experiencing time over the life cycle (levin and Zakay, 1989). Demographers take time and space into consideration in analyzing trends, generational and cohort effects, migration patterns, and the aging of populations. at the same time, these two variables have limited visibility in these disciplines. if one examines the list of “sections” of their professional associations, there are no subdisciplines or sections with the names “psychology of time,” “sociology of time,” or “anthropology of time” among their dozens of subspecializations, and there is a similar lack of explicit reference to space as a category. Despite this semihidden status, social scientists have recognized the power of these fundamental dimensions of human existence, incorporated them directly into their research, and produced relevant and usable research findings. in this chapter, we draw together a sample of their results. tWo ClaSSiCal StUDieS oN tHe SPaCe-tiMe a xiS friendships in a Housing Project More than six decades ago, three psychologists, all later to become very distinguished , published a study (festinger, Schachter, and Back, 1950) of social dynamics in a housing project for married veteran graduate students at the Massachusetts institute of technology. They focused on small friendship groups and cliques, norms, conformity, and deviance. They employed a method (sociometric analysis) favored at the time and since reborn and employed under different names in network analysis (see chapter 4, pp. 130–39). Using that method, the investigators simply asked respondents about whom they saw socially and whom they liked and disliked. Then they proceeded to construct sociometric maps of friends, “stars,” and isolates. Space and Time 17 earlier Stouffer (1940) had written about the importance of space in social life in general: “Whether one is seeking to explain ‘why’ persons go to a particular place to get jobs, ‘why’ they go to trade at a particular store, ‘why’ they go to a particular neighborhood to commit a crime...