The structures and meanings of social-time

David Lewis

Andrew J. Weigart

pp. 77-101

in: John Hassard (ed), The sociology of time, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1990

Abstract

In the years since Sorokin and Merton published their groundbreaking article [1937, see Chapter 4 in this volume] on the sociology of time inviting us to probe its qualitative and meaningful features, a number of insightful books and articles have dealt with aspects of social-time. Most sociologists, however, treat time as incidental to other sociological problems rather than meriting investigation in its own right. Consequently, there is a dearth of theoretical work on the sociology of time that might lead to a general paradigm for integrating the disparate empirical studies in this developing subfield.