Bronislaw Malinowski addressed the functions of time as fol­lows: “A system of reckoning time is a practical, as well as a sentimental, ne­cessity in every culture, however simple. Members of every human group have the need of coordinating various activities, of fixing dates for the future, of placing reminiscences in the past, of gauging the length of bygone periods and of those to come” (1990, p. 203). Sixty-three years later Barbara Adam would state it thus: “As ordering principle, social tool for co-ordination, orientation, and regulation, as a symbol for the conceptual organisation of natural and so­cial events, social scientists view time as constituted by social activity” (1990, p. 42).