Doing time in the sociology of education

Abstract

This article is both an editorial introduction for this special issue and a distinctive contribution in its own right. The article seeks to extend a dynamic and multiple conception of time to the sociology of education to think beyond the clock time associated with modernity and industrialisation. This need is illustrated through an account and critique of E.P. Thompson’s canonical account of clock time. The article argues that this construction of clock time implicitly frames most work in the sociology of education. The concept of ‘timespace’ offers a way to go beyond both clock time and the current ‘spatial turn’ in the sociology of education that prioritises space over time. It is shown how computerisation also ushers in a new temporality, which works simultaneously with clock time and perhaps presages the move from a disciplinary to control society. The article accepts that there are multiple and dynamic temporalities and correlatively supports a working together of historical and sociological imaginations towards a sociology of education that acknowledges and works with multiple temporalities, empirically, methodologically, theoretically and in research writing.

Keywords:

• Multiple temporalities
• philosophy of history
• Bergson
• timespace
• duration
• redemption

… the need to project ourselves into the future has never been so strong, while we have never been so poorly armed on the conceptual front to conceive this future, which leaves a wide gap between the historic rupture that confronts us and our difficulty in interpreting it. (Laidi 1998, 1)

Why do we remember the past and not the future? (Hawking 1988, 37)

Introduction

The relationships between sociology and the temporal maintain an implicit set of relations to other constructs, often imbued with Marxist resonances of time and labour value. This is particularly true of sociology of education. In this article, and indeed this special issue, we aim to trouble the temporal status quo, whereby time is considered as a linear, objective process that exists outside the experience of the individual within time. We argue instead that time is a human construct. Further, time is both multiple and dynamic, and the construction of a sense of time frames our understandings and actions, our institutions and their organisation, our engagement with technologies, our explanations of the past and our present sense of purpose, and our individual and collective imagination for the future. In this article, we use the concept of ‘timespace’ to pick up on this multiplicity and dynamism of time and reflect on its implications for reimagining the sociology of education.

Time always operates through its relation to other concepts; time and value, time and development, time and space, time and life, time and work, time and leisure. Importantly, we want to maintain that a sense of time is produced rather than realised. The defining engine of a common sense of time is historical, because modernism relies on a conception of time as linear, sequential progress. All social science, including the sociology of education, exists and is developed within this progressive modernist project. This has been foundational to how we understand education as a project (indeed, even that we think education is a project).

It would appear that the sociology of education is in the midst of what may be termed a ‘spatial turn’, which Soja (1989) describes as the reinsertion of space in social theory. Brennan (2006, 136) has suggested that this spatial turn in social theory, which sees a renewed focus on space and place, reflects the ‘overcoming of temporality’ that has precipitated a shift from ‘tempo to scale’, from the ‘chronometric to the cartographic’.

In the sociology of education, the reinsertion of the spatial can be seen in the theoretical developments relating to network governance (Ball and Junemann 2012), topology and education policy (Thompson and Cook 2015), new geographies (Gulson and Symes 2007), Actor Network Theory and educational research (Fenwick and Edwards 2012), and Bourdieusian fields and cross-field effects (Lingard and Rawolle 2011). Indeed, past issues of the British Journal of Sociology of Education attest to the appeal of these new spatial theorisations of complex phenomena such as disadvantage (Smyth and McInerney 2013), the justice of school closures in Chicago (Grant et al. 2014) and adolescent sexualities (Allen 2013).

We need to stress from the outset that we do not disagree with these analyses; in fact we have contributed in various ways to this spatialising project. Time and the temporal, however, have been ignored, forgotten or subsumed within these spatialisations. For example, one thinks here about the word ‘space-time’ as popularised in Harvey’s (1989, 2005) work on globalisation and neoliberalism that assumes the subordination of time to space. Or Laidi’s (1998, 7) polysemic concept of ‘world time’, which references the coming together of globalisation and the end of the Cold War signalling the end of utopian political projects and of metanarratives. However, as evidenced in much of the work being done in fields such as critical geography, there is a danger in a naïve conceptualisation of space that can be ‘curiously one-dimensional and which, at root, seem premised upon a familiar and unhelpful dualism moving around the foundational categories of Space and Time’ (May and Thrift 2003, 1).

Instead, we tentatively suggest we are beginning to experience a new temporality. In his article in this special issue, Robert Hassan speaks of a transition from ‘analogue’ to ‘digital’ or ‘network time’, the former central to modernist projects, the latter endemic to the contemporary networked globalised world. For Hassan, ‘network time’ refers to the ‘online experience of time’. Most of the articles in this special issue accept and illustrate how computerisation in our digitised society has affected the lived experience of time, especially in educational institutions. In arguing for the importance of rethinking time and the temporal in the sociology of education, we seek to extend Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time to contemporary sociological inquiry, ‘questions relating to subject and object, to their distinction and their union, should be put in terms of time rather than of space’ (Bergson 1991, 77).

As May and Thrift go on to argue, theorising time as a separate entity from space is equally problematic; instead, we must recognise that ‘time is irrecoverably bound up with the spatial constitution of society (and vice versa)’ (2003, 2). They advocate ‘timespace’ as embracing the multiplicity and complexity of a non-dualist account, a layered concept that recognises, first, that a sense of time is shaped by ‘our responses to a series of timetables and rhythms … occurring in the natural universe’ such as the seasons (2003, 3; original emphasis). Second, timespace refers to the sense of time produced though ‘systems of social discipline’, whereby sense is affected by the ‘spatial arrangements’ evident within those settings, such as the imposition of time discipline within the factory or school (2003, 4; original emphasis). Such time discipline is redolent of Virilio’s (2012, 23) talk of the ‘administration of duration’. Third, timespace recognises that a sense of time emerges from relationships with ‘instruments and devices … devised to either mark the passage of time or which work to alter our conception of its duration and passing’ (May and Thrift 2003, 4; original emphasis). Finally, timespace argues that a sense of time is produced ‘in relation to various texts … understood as vehicles of translation (attempts to render social meaning from new conceptualisations of Time itself)’ (2003, 4; original emphasis).

One important thing to note is May and Thrift’s criticism of sociological accounts of time that tend to privilege one of the four domains over others (see also Glennie and Thrift 1996). For example, May and Thrift identify E.P. Thompson’s seminal work on labour time and time-thrift in the school as attending too much to the spatial, resulting in a form of determinism, a point we will return to later. That is the thrust of this special issue: ‘Doing Time in the Sociology of Education’ necessarily requires giving time to time, not at the expense of the spatial but as the equal partner. This necessarily involves moving beyond the certainty of four-dimensional space and time to working within scientific and philosophical conceptions. Interestingly, in the policy sociology of education, attention is now being paid to ‘fast policymaking’ (Peck and Theodore 2015) and the acceleration and intensification of transnational flows of policy globally. Here we see a new timespace of education policy. Peck and Theodore (2015) also emphasise acceleration and speed in relation to policy-making and mobility today. They note:

Speed does seem to be of the essence here, but it is a kind of speed that is manifest in the intensification of long-distance (inter)connections, one that is revealed in the fortified reach and extended range of mobile policy frames, routines, and models, and one that takes account of the heightened immediacy, saliency, and indeed urgency of what have apparently become increasingly compressed policymaking moments. (Peck and Theodore 2015, xvii)

The articles in this special issue argue that this is necessary because temporalities have changed and are experienced differently in the globalised and digitised age of the present.

About time: time for sociology of education to engage with time

We argue that it is ‘about time’ that time became a focus for theorising, methodological reflection and empirical work in sociology of education because the conditions of time are in flux (see Julie McLeod, Robert Hassan and Greg Thompson and Ian Cook in this special issue). Digital communication, technological change and the implications that these have for space and the traditional partitions that occur in time (i.e. culture, citizenship, membership of various groups) are functioning differently today, and these new timespaces require new tools, new lenses, new theories and applications.

We also make this call at what we might see, after Goodwin and Gosvenor (2011), as a moment of insecurity for contemporary history of education. Drawing on Thomson (2014), Julie McLeod’s article explores ‘the affordances of working across and in between historical and sociological imaginations’. Specifically, paralleling our argument, she argues the necessity of a ‘new kind of historically rich sociology of education attuned to multiple temporalities’. Greg Thompson and Ian Cook use Foucault and Deleuze to suggest that at this moment we are seeing the overlaying of ‘control society’ on ‘disciplinary society’ and that the resulting sense of the temporal is affecting teachers’ experiences of school time as ‘arrhythmia’. Sandra Leaton Gray speaks of three categories of time in her article, which when experienced together constitute multiple temporalities. These are ‘fixed time’, or what we would refer to as clock time, ‘biological time’ – for example, manifested in schools as the developmental stage of students – and ‘social time’, which picks up on those technologies and artefacts that rely on a shared, social construction of time – for example, school terms, semesters and school years (generally calendrical in the southern hemisphere, seasonal in the north).

The sociology of education, however, is also concerned with ‘our time’, or the notion of time as a milieu. There has always been a desire to understand how it is that human history and development have led us to our current point, or to try to ‘diagnose’ what it is that characterises our present, and social, troubles. One thinks here of Deleuze’s description of writers as ‘sympotomatologists’, building on Nietzsche’s description of artists as ‘physicians of culture’ (Smith 1997, 170). Symptomatology refers to the art of diagnosing ‘a particular way of existing’ through the ‘grouping of symptoms, in the organisation of a table [tableau] where one symptom is dissociated from another, juxtaposed to a third, and forms the new figure of a disorder or illness’ (1997, 170). If sociology has a desire to move beyond its doxa, it must contribute diagnoses and practice symptomatology to group the symptoms, to identify the key characteristics creating social forces in order to create new concepts with which to understand the world (Deleuze 1997). Examples such as Bauman’s notion of liquid, or second modernity, Rosa’s notion of social acceleration (see Buddeberg and Hornberg and Sellar and Cole in this special issue) and Giddens’ notion of the third way come to mind here.

While these diagnoses point to various forces that are ailing the social, critical for our argument is that all of these ailments identified, classified, grouped and compared conceal their implicit relationship, or grounding, in the temporal. The most obvious referent point is the relationship between past, present and future. This has led to a variety of temporal descriptors, which can be found in recent papers in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, ranging across the identification of economic, political and social forces as constituting a time of austerity (Veck 2014), neoliberal times (Jaeger 2016) and complex times (Hardy 2015), to name just a few. Time is central to our concerns, both in describing why it is that we are concerned and in forming the basis for creating value such that judgement (what are the symptoms, what are the diagnoses?) is rendered possible, and indeed urgent.

Correspondingly, if there is a concern with a milieu evident in sociology of education, there is also a concern regarding a sociology that is fit for our times. There is an ongoing concern within sociology itself in relation to the purposes, goals, methods and theories that the sociology of education has inherited. For example, Lauder, Brown, and Halsey (2011) develop a historical account of the sociology of education as a discipline in the UK context. They trace this development from a political, arithmetic approach at the London School of Economics after the Second World War, through the ‘new sociology of education’ of Michael Young of the 1970s, onto neo-Marxist reproduction theories informed by Bowles and Gintis (1976) and Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), and then theories of resistance from Willis (1979), before moving to poststructural theories and their various developments, in and through feminist (for example, Arnott, David, and Weiner 1999) and postcolonial approaches (Gillborn 2008), to name a few.

Lauder, Brown, and Halsey also argue that as teacher education has come more closely under the purview of the state through imposed regulations and standards, the place of the sociology of education in faculties of education is possibly under siege. They point out that there appears to be a generational issue in this crisis of sociology of education. Lauder and colleagues also mention the move by sociologists of education in the 1980s and 1990s to focus on education policy, when under concerted political attack during the Thatcher period, as policy became central to government’s management and steering of schooling systems and when sociology of education had lost its role in teacher education. Importantly, they talk about the establishment by Len Barton of this journal, the British Journal of Sociology of Education, in 1979 as central to the professionalisation of the sociology of education. The ‘policy turn’ in sociology of education, they suggest, was manifested in the creation of the Journal of Education Policy in 1985 by Stephen Ball and his colleagues.

Lauder, Brown, and Halsey, drawing on Dale (2001), argue that from the outset the sociology of education has been a redemptive project; initially one that sought to ‘banish inequality and enable individual development’ (2011, 15). They presciently suggest that tracing the changing foci of this redemptive project enables a useful way to charter changes in the sociology of education over time (theoretically, methodologically and, we would add, normatively). Think here of the feminist project in sociology of education, of the anti-racism project, of human rights and so on. This redemptive character of the sociology of education also works with an underpinning assumption that the present is not functioning in a socially just manner and that the research and knowledge of the sociology of education have a role to play in redemption of this situation. Thus in much redemptive sociology of education there is an implicit better, more socially just, imagined future, indicative of its modernist lineage.¹ In this way, we would suggest that an implicit construction of time has framed the sociology of education as a disciplinary and political project. Redemption as a concept is, of course, a temporal one, oriented as it is to correcting past and present injustices for a better future. What is interesting about redemptive projects, of course, is that they depend on the temporality of their tools of diagnosis, their timespace if you will.

Spatialised time

If we were to characterise the concept of time that has dominated the sociology of education, with some exceptions, we would suggest that it has been that of a linear and progressive, yet constitutive, time. In other words, just as education has inherited clock time and put this to work, so too has sociological inquiry into education. As already argued, this is perhaps most evident in E.P. Thompson’s seminal 1967 paper on time, work and education published in the history journal Past and Present. The article ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’ traces the impact that the regulation of time in the forms of the clock and the watch had on work habits, social structures, dispositions and values expressed in the ordering of educational institutions. He argued that the concept of clock time framed how people understood themselves and lived their lives. This affected their sense of what was appropriate conduct in time, as an effect of the standardisation of life and living. Thus, Thompson is arguing against the notion that changes in time discipline were caused by new manufacturing techniques. Rather, he argues that time discipline is an effect of wider cultural change that shaped how people were oriented to work, and therefore time itself. Specifically, he observes:

In all these ways – by the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports – new labour habits were formed, and a new time-discipline was imposed. (Thompson 1967, 90)

New time disciplines were initially externally introduced and enforced, but over time these logics became internalised as what time is, and should be; a process of normalisation, if you will. As Thompson goes on to say, schooling is central to this normalisation that instils a morality about time, or what he terms ‘time-thrift’, where ‘time is now currency: it is not passed but spent’ (Thompson 1967, 61). Thompson notes on schooling and time-thrift:

One other non-industrial institution lay to hand which might be used to inculcate ‘time-thrift’: the school. Clayton complained that the streets of Manchester were full of ‘idle ragged children; who are not only losing their Time, but learning habits of gaming’. (Thompson 1967, 84)

Clock time, or what we will call the ‘spatialisation of time’, broken as it is into finite moments (seconds, minutes, hours, etc.), changes subjectivity in that it instils a care for, or value of, time-thrift within the worker, which becomes a means of relating to the world outside the factory. Thompson calls this change in subjectivity ‘the inward notation of time’ (Thompson 1967, 57). The reduction of time to that which clocks represent is significant. The Industrial Revolution altered people’s experiences, expectations and behaviours through the production of subjectivities focused on the discourse of time-thrift.

Thompson’s work on clock time is seminal in the study of time for three reasons: first, because it authorised following generations of sociologists to see time, and its internalisation, as an appropriate field of inquiry. Second, because Thompson used the historical record to name the school as a significant site of time-thrift. Notions of development, of progress, of the correct order are central to how the school was discursively constructed, and no doubt lived. For example, exhortations to punctuality and regularity were written into the rules of all of the early schools (Thompson 1967, 84). This relationship between schooling and time – clock time – indicates the reciprocal way time has been thought about between and practised within schools and the sociology of education.

The critique of spatialised time

This critique of time as clock time has a history, with perhaps the most notable figure being the French philosopher Henri Bergson. For Bergson, clock time is really a form of spatialisation, rather than temporalisation. Clocks break time down into discrete moments, as entities that exist in relation to, but independent of, the next moment of time, which proceeds in a sequential manner. The ticking of the clock, after all, represents the move from one second to the next, and each tick or tock represents a move from one moment to the next. This compartmentalisation of time, for Bergson, means that clock time only ‘becomes measurable when it is made divisible’ (Scott 2006, 186) and ignores the fact that time essentially flows:

One only buys a clock to know what time it is; and ‘to know what time it is’ consists in observing a correspondence, not between what two clocks indicate, but between the time indicated and the moment where one finds oneself, the event that is taking place, in the last instance not something that is an indication of time on a clock. (Bergson 1999, 157)

Bergson argues that clock time cannot account for consciousness, nor can it recognise that time does not pass from space to space, from moment to moment. Rather, time has duration, in that there ‘is no way to separate two instants of the “before” and the immediate “afterward,” and the memory that establishes their continuity of existence’ (Scott 2006, 186). For Bergson, the problem with breaking time into measurable moments ignores that time is lived, and this lived time flows in multiple directions, such that the past and future are always available in the present. This is what Bergson calls co-extension. Time is not a passive record of movement from one instant to the next, rather it is an active elaboration:

I said to myself, time is something. Therefore it acts. What can it do? Simple good sense responds: time is what prevents that everything be given at once. It delays, or rather it is delay. It must therefore be a kind of elaboration. Is it not then the vehicle of creation and choice? Does the existence of time not prove that there is indeterminacy in things? Isn’t time itself this indeterminacy? (Bergson 1991, 1333)

Co-extension functions through what Bergson termed memory and desire. For Bergson, memory is intelligent or active recognition, what we would see as ‘consciousness’:

All consciousness is conservation and accumulation of the past in the present, retention of the before in the after, integration of ‘the dead into the living’. We will emphasize two aspects of this capacity to conserve and accumulate time. First, memory is the creation of a gap, a temporal interval between the movements that are received and those that are carried out by each body. Second, within this gap there arises and develops the force that acts and exploits this delay, this moment of indeterminacy between action and reaction. This force is simultaneously will and sensation, spontaneity and receptivity, memory and habit. (Lazzarato 2007, 94)

Every memory is not only of the past, but is an elaboration of the future. In this, memory is an action. It ‘works as a force capable of affecting, of producing images and of acting. The conservation and accumulation of the past takes place as a function not of “what is” but of “what will be”’ (Lazzarato 2007, 96). Habit, on the other hand, is a memory ‘fixed in the body … or an “automatic” or “passive” recognition. Within this memory the past is conserved in the motor mechanisms of our organism’ (2007, 101). Thus, the present is the dynamic sense of past and future, such that time can ‘speed up’ when one experiences states of high arousal or stress, and ‘slow down’ when one is either bored or uninterested. Of course, for Bergson this has implications for memory; we access it differently depending upon our emotional and mental states. In this, Bergson’s theory posits time as a dynamic multiplicity.

To extend the analysis, the problem with clock time is that it fails to recognise how a sense of time acts or is forceful. If we return to the problems that Lauder, Brown, and Halsey (2011) identify in the sociology of education and the redemptive project, a useful line of inquiry is to consider the timespace of the collective practice of sociology of education, its habit and memory so to speak, to consider how it recognises its force, its capacity to action, and what possibilities exist outside a ‘reductive’ present. Perhaps it is small wonder that the ghost of Margaret Thatcher and the call of neoliberalism continue to haunt the future-as-memory of a self-conscious discipline.

Of course, Bergson’s theorisation of time as multiple and dynamic, Deleuze’s notion of identifying symptoms, and May and Thrift’s embrace of timespace share an ethic that seems to be as much about asking how a better understanding of time could draw us a map where something active, and urgent, may happen. One of the ways of thinking about this is at the level of sociological research itself; that is, in the production of papers, books and presentations, the artefacts of the academy. In the second volume of his trilogy Technics and Time, Bernard Stiegler (1998b) turns to Barthes’ book Camera Lucida to grapple with the production of artefacts via technology that constitute a form of tertiary memory; that is, express the collective memories or insights which live on after the death of the individual(s) who proffer these recollections and insights.

Technics, which for Stiegler derives from the Greek tekne, encompasses those tools that serve to store memory and shape behaviour in various ways. Technics includes more rudimentary physical tools such as shovels, weapons and crutches, as well as more abstract tools dependent upon writing and forms of code, such as books, social media and other forms of digital technology. The point, for Stiegler (1998a, 1998b), is that technics acts as ‘prosthesis’ or a storage medium that exteriorises memory. It is this exteriorisation of memory that constitutes the collective expression of what it is to be human, how we understand the social, sociality and expect to see society as functioning, or, as Stiegler (1998a) describes it, ‘the who’ that is always in a stage of individual, collective and epochal creation with ‘the what’. Thus, when Stiegler (1998b, 14; original emphasis), drawing on Barthes, looks at the photograph he sees a double: ‘I can now actually see someone dead; that is, who has not passed away. The past is present in the photograph’. Furthermore, this doubling is Bergsonian in that past, present and future are all operable within the meaning made. When we see ourselves, or someone we know in a photograph:

… a new dissociation-identification is initiated … To see myself in a photograph is to (re-)see myself in a de-severing and extension that opens a space between here and there, past and future, thus rendering possible the passage of time … (Stiegler 1998b, 17)

For Stiegler (1998b), the inherent danger in this relationship between ‘the who’ and ‘the what’ is what he calls the ‘industrialisation of memory’. This refers to the technical synthesisation of memory that produces ‘a loss of individuation on the part of the who [the human] in favour of the what [technics]’ (Stiegler 1998b, 75; added brackets). What happens for Stiegler is that in the digital age, where so many media services, digital devices, social media platforms and online programmes aim to mediate our experience – that is, to filter and organise us through our attention (which Stiegler calls ‘eventalisation’) – temporalisation is radically altered as speed and rhythm changes.

Now, while Stiegler’s critique is far more developed than the brief taste presented here, we think that there is something interesting about how we might consider sociological research as an exteriorisation of memory, making it a technics that is always and already temporal. This would mean paying attention to ‘the who’ and ‘the what’, those processes of subjectification (e.g. of the researcher, of the interviewee, of the student represented by a data point being subjected to secondary analysis) and the technics that are being used (to record, to inscribe, to measure, to calculate), in such a way as to produce a sociological programme for and in education. This would also require attending to the passing of time, from the moment that a problem is represented, through the collection of data, to the analysis to publication – a process that can take many years. What we produce is a temporal record, which endures (duree), has rhythm and contains the marks of various speeds and accelerations. Furthermore, as our times, or milieu, witness a restructuring of time, from analogue to the digital, how do we deal with what Stiegler calls the disorientation of the collective, or tertiary, memory? What is happening to the social, as we proliferate artefacts that claim to speak about it, create insight into it and record it?

Furthermore, if we return to the notion of some form of balance between the who and the what, and the notion of memory prosthesis that is contained within the corpus of sociology past, how do we avoid the risk of disciplinary amnesia (do we still talk about structural functionalism anymore)? Alternatively, how do we guard against the problems of disciplinary stasis (where all we can talk about is structural functionalism, and how insightful our forebears were), as if time stood still and we are confronting the same problems.

Doing time in the sociology of education

Julie McLeod opens this special issue with a provocation on time in the sociology of education and about methodological issues in sociological research in education related to time. The article considers the implications of insights from philosophy of history in relation to multiple and colliding temporalities. McLeod also writes insightfully about the time of conducting research and data collection. She notes that in the research write-up, this time past of data collection is represented or masquerades as the present. There is something of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s (1952) ‘decisive moment’ in photography here, with the photograph freezing time but existing in a perpetual present. The time of the conduct of data collection in research is often ignored. In this provocation, she compares two longitudinal studies of young people and their developing identities and ideas over time, and uses this comparison to reflect on methodological issues and theory about research time and historical change. Interestingly, one of these projects is entitled ‘Making Futures’ and works with considerations of the relationships between past, present and future and the role of memory in relation to these. Griffiths’ (2016, 10) observation ‘that the present, to which we pay so much lip service, snaps into solidity in a moment’ seems apposite here. In McLeod’s provocation she utilises many useful concepts for grasping how we might think about and use time in sociology of education, including ‘temporal modes of becoming’, ‘spaces of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’, the need to look both ‘panoptically’ and ‘myopically’ and so on. She calls for a new consideration of time in the sociology of education and suggests the usefulness of working together the sociological and historical imaginations in this project, which is the raison d’être for this special issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education.

Greg Thompson and Ian Cook also deal with the overlaying of different temporalities in their analysis of the ways teachers experience time in a computerised and digitised age of audits, testing and test-based accountability. They contrast Foucault’s disciplinary society and its complementarity with the clock time of modernity and industrialism, with that of the globalised, digitised, modulated present of the control society as argued by Deleuze. They suggest that two temporalities of discipline and control overlay each other and affect teachers’ work and their experiences of time. Disciplinary society is one of enclosure and is linked to a particular machine age; that of the thermodynamic machine. In contrast, the control society links to the computer age of digitised change and control, based on the datafication of the social. The impact in the work life of teachers is a sense of time-poverty and acceleration, but also of arrhythmia as the disciplinary and control constructions of time rub up against each other. There is something akin here to the values schizophrenia that Ball (2003) writes about as teachers respond to test and audit pressures, but also hold to more humanist construction of their professional goals and practices.

Accelerationism is the focus of the article by Sam Sellar and David Cole. Accelerationism as a politics seeks to discover which aspects of capitalism might be accelerated to challenge capitalism so as to move speed the transition to what lies beyond. They traverse three iterations of accelerationism (libertarian post-Marxist, science fiction, promethean left), and then consider whether accelerated utilisation of technology in education can proceed without a necessary link to cognitive capitalism, commercialisation and profit-making. More broadly, this is the question of the necessary/actual relationship between new technologies and capitalism. In that context, drawing on the work of Nick Land, they speak of ‘techonomic time’. Specifically, Sellar and Cole ask: ‘Can technological acceleration be separated from capitalist acceleration?’ Empirically, they consider educational technology, the moves to new data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data in one school system in Australia, whereby the use of education technology to modulate system, school and classroom practices has been outsourced to a private company. Sellar and Cole actually suggest that only large commercial enterprises, such as Microsoft, have the computational capacities to deal with these data developments and big data-sets. Their empirical case study provides yet another example of the contemporary commercialisation of public schooling (see Verger, Lubienski, and Steiner-Khamsi 2016).Yet, while being critical of much of this, they argue the need, à la accelerationism, to consider the possibilities for progressive change that new technologies provide, both to a broader political project, but also in/for education.

Magdalena Buddeberg and Sabine Hornberg use Rosa’s theorising of acceleration as a backdrop to consideration of its significance for schools and curricula in a rapidly globalising world. They argue that there is an accelerated obsolescence in knowledge and more rapid knowledge production globally that carries significant implications for the knowledges taught in schools. One response they suggest has been to emphasise competencies rather than knowledges. We would add here that in the context they document, there has also been return to an emphasis on powerful knowledges in the sociological work of Michael Young, the architect of the new sociology of education in 1971 with the collection he edited Knowledge and Control. Young now rejects the epistemological relativism of that earlier approach and instead embraces a critical realism for thinking about school curricula. We would suggest that it is a combination of competencies and a return to disciplinary and powerful knowledges that have framed curriculum moves across the globe. For example, Australia has a new discipline-based national curriculum cut across by some cross-curriculum priorities and general capabilities. Here we might suggest that schooling is still central to culture (as well as the economy) and that arguments outside of an economic determinism and human capital framing still affect policy and curriculum debates. Despite globalisation, schools still have a role in producing citizens for the imagined community that is the nation, as well as producing ‘global citizens’, a more recent policy move globally. In the contemporary context of globalisation and the substantial flows of refugees and migrants across the globe (Appadurai’s ‘ethnoscapes’), nations seek to control citizenship and perhaps ethnos remains another matter that nations might still be able to control, with schooling and curricula being important here. Appadurai argues that ‘The nation-state has been steadily reduced to the fiction of its ethnos as the last cultural resource over which it may exercise full dominion’ (2006, 23).

Sandra Leaton Gray’s contribution deals with schooling and the different constructions of time external to and internal to the school. Here she speaks of the ‘asynchronous’ contribution of computers and the Web in learning (especially of middle-class young people) outside the classroom and the ‘synchronous’ character of the teacher/student relationship in classrooms. This evoked for us a contrast with Anderson’s (1991) argument about the centrality of print capitalism to the creation of nations; the timespace of nations, if you will. Schooling through the production of mass literacy was subsequently very important here to the creation of the ‘imagined community’ of the nation. Here we see schooling as a disciplinary institution and space of enclosure. Appadurai (1996) extends this characterisation in terms of the new computer technologies and argues that what we have today, in addition to the imagined community of the nation we would add, is ‘imagined worlds’, worlds which are potentially global in their reach. Yet, as Thompson and Cook argue in their article, this potentially also can usher in a control society when computerisation is applied to the world of schools and teachers. Leaton Gray uses Bernstein’s ‘conditions for democracy’ framework to evaluate the effects on social justice of the play of the asynchronous with the synchronous. She argues persuasively that the disadvantaged endure ‘a notional time penalty’ because of less access to top-quality technology and ‘patchy broadband provision’.

Robert Hassan in his article makes an important distinction between analogue time and digital time. Based on this distinction, he writes a critical evaluation of the impact of the shift from one to the other on the contemporary university and particularly on the humanities and social sciences. In that context, he speaks of the ‘digital university’ (think Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS), ebooks and ejournals) and ‘network time’. Network time, he suggests, means that clock time becomes irrelevant or secondary and refers to the ‘online experience of time’. He argues that, drawing on a range of evidence, including anthropological work, we are analogue creatures and that such a construction of time aligns with nature, while network time is disjunctive and out of sync with clock or analogue time. Network time functions through a different ontology. The important point, however, for his critical account of the digital university is that the university was a product of the Enlightenment and that print technologies were essential to this historical emergence. Furthermore, he argues the need for face-to-face discussion and conversations in the humanities and social sciences, and time for contemplative reading and thinking. At the most macro level, his critique links to the fact that the move to network time and the digital university is also intimately imbricated in the global dominance of neoliberal market capitalism.

Conclusion

Ultimately, it seems to us that time is central to the sociology of education in numerous ways. This special issue gathers together articles that recognise the necessity of a renewed and reconceptualised temporal focus in contemporary sociology of education. In a way, this requires a meshing of sociological and historical imaginations. All of the articles argue that time works differently today in the age of globalisation and computerisation. This has been referred to variously as network time, digital time, techonomic time, time of the control society and so on. The argument is that this is different from clock time and thus requires a new lens in the sociology of education, which has either tended to ignore the temporal or to implicitly work with clock time. The articles actually note a reality of multiple temporalities in the present and that time is socially constructed and experienced. We accept these prescient observations, but also have suggested that Bergson offers a sophisticated account of time as duration, which moves us beyond clock time and also allows for a move beyond space dominating accounts of time in, for example, Harvey’s (1989) talk of space–time compression. We have argued in this article that the concept of ‘timespace’ is most useful for reworking the sociology of education project to properly account for the temporal. In a parallel way and more broadly, McLeod has demonstrated ably how there are insights for this reworking of the sociology of education to be derived from the philosophy of history. We have also noted the necessity for methodology to take account of the temporal in data collection and writing about data analysis.

A good example of our argument concerning the necessity of working the spatial and temporal together – timespace – is evident if we want to understand the increased policy and practice salience of international large-scale assessments such as the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and of national testing in schooling; for example in Australia, the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy. We know much technical work goes into the creation of these tests and their analyses, but we also recognise that both forms of testing have spatial effects. International testing in effect makes or constitutes the globe as a commensurate space of measurement, with national testing likewise constituting the nation as a commensurate space of measurement. There is an implicit isomorphism in such tests as well, and a new topology of policy-making and evaluation (Ball and Junemann 2012, 78). So there is an important spatial element here, part of the new spatialisations associated with globalisation, and indicative of the reach of new technologies and, of course, of enhanced computational capacities. However, we would argue that there is very much also a temporal element to these global accountabilities. For example, all students sitting for both types of tests on the same days, results released on the same days, evidencing an assumption of diverse schools within nations and diverse schooling systems across the globe as functioning in the same temporality (a new timespace) and, of course, also at the same time, helping to construct such temporal commonality and alignment. Further, enhanced computational power promises to capture and analyse data ‘in real time’ in the not-too-distant future, a fascinating possible timespace.

On these matters, Lyotard (1984) suggests that one response to the death of metanarratives, which he associates with postmodernity, is that systems are now kept functioning through input/output equations, which value efficiency over other values. We might see international and national testing in this light, having significant values effects in schools and schooling systems. However, in terms of the temporal, moves within such testing regimes towards computer adaptive online testing – personalisation – and the aspirations for such tests to be taken at the most propitious time for teacher and student, suggest a new temporality. As Thompson and Cook argue in their article in this special issue, such potential/emergent developments in testing are redolent of what Deleuze calls the modulated control society and control institutions (also see Thompson [2016] for a more detailed elaboration of this argument). Understanding, within a sociology of education framework, what is happening with international and national testing requires consideration of timespace, not as a static object but as dynamic processes.

One of the challenges for sociology (and the sociology of education) has always been how to think about the social. While there have been many perspectives on this, in fact the orientation to this may constitute the history of sociology, perhaps our final provocation is to wonder what it may be like to see the social as processual; that is, not as an object that can be measured and inquired about (the idea of society as atemporal), but as a series of relations, of flows of forces across surfaces, that calls forth notions of speeds and slownesses, of accelerations and compressions. In sociology, the distinction that Connell (1977) drew some time ago now in relation to understanding social class between categorical accounts and generative accounts illustrates the point here. Categorical accounts of class simply sort people into categories in an atemporal way, whereas generative accounts of social class, Connell argues, focus on the processes and practices that generate class and thus conceptualise class as an event, rather than a category. The focus here is on ‘the activity of people’, rather than ‘their location in social space’ (1977, 5). The categorical approach within sociology to social class is atemporal, while in contrast the generative approach acknowledges temporality. Also, of course, Connell et al. (1982) in the influential sociology of education text, Making the Difference, utilised such a generative account in their analysis of the multifarious ways in which schools produce and reproduce class relations.

To conclude in a speculative rather than definitive way, if Deleuze is correct and society can be typified by the machines that dominate it in specific milieu (see Thompson and Cook, this issue), that technics are always and already social, what then are the new resources that sociology of education needs to discover and/or cultivate in order to explain the age of planetary computerisation? What is this future that we need to remember, in order to understand this thing we, sociologists and sociologists of education, call the social?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgement

The authors thank Dr Sam Sellar for his comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

1. We note that Boltanski (2011) argues that this redemptive, emancipatory impulse is necessary to critical social science.