Understanding the growing success of time management principles

Time has been the object of control since many centuries, but the idea of time as something “to be managed” is more specific to the late modernity. Time management techniques and courses have been imported from the US to Europe in the 60ties, and were mostly addressed to managers and CEO’s (Sabelis, 2001; Boltanski, 1981). They were used essentially to help these categories of workers to plan and organize their daily work in order to be more effective. From the 80ties onwards, they progressively became extended to all kinds of working groups and functions, while addressing a wider scope of problems. How can this recent success of working individually on one’s relation to time be understood? The hypothesis followed in this paper is that this phenomenon is significant of a subjective turn taken by the modern idea which relates time to issues of control. In a society where individual autonomy is put on the pinnacle of our values, mastering one’s own relation to time becomes a meaningful way of addressing some difficulties encountered on – and beyond – the work floor. This paper seeks to put forward how this narrative of personal time management works and how it frames what a temporal problem is. It will first outline the two classical ways sociological literature reads these new time management practices, i.e. the declinist and Foucauldian approaches. Although they give some interpretation tracks, they lack in giving satisfying leads to understand important aspects of the phenomenon when condemning them a priori through a “suspicion epistemology” (Illouz, 2008). Building on a pragmatic approach to time culture, the article then goes on investigating the specific ways time management coaches – whose practices were the object of a qualitative empirical enquiry - outline what a good relation to time would be: what it means and why it is relevant or what it allows. What comes to the fore is that the core problem with time is not so much the (un-)ability to follow the high paces of work environments, but much more the (sense of) loss of control over one’s time and over social- and organizational-dictated rhythms. We will see how this narrative is built on a specific consideration of the relationship between individual and social times, when agency is precisely that which is aimed for. We will then turn to what this ideal of mastering ones time requires. Building on the similarities found in the observation of support practices of social workers with vulnerable unemployed people, it appears that the means to approach this individual temporal competency is unequally distributed. In addition, we suggest that it is a standard narrative which is not only performative in the evaluation of workers but also in public policies related to employment.