More than that, if Hayek is right about a particular level of complexity being unable to understand its own or a higher level of complexity, it would be impossible to understand the nature of sociotemporality in the first place.

Based on a practice view, we suggest the followingdefinition ofcoordination: a temporally unfolding andcontextualized process of input regulation and inter-action articulation to realize a collective performance.

Theprimarygoalispatientstabilizationandini-tiating atreatment trajectory—a temporally unfolding

. Previously, scholars have generally ignored any notion of time. Now, we need to make explicit our use of time in understanding disaster. Such an application, I believe, will give us a much deeper understanding on defining disaster, how and why such events unfold, and how various social entities attempt to return to normal after the event. Finally, the use of social time in disaster can provide sociologists a deeper look into understanding key theoretical issues related to social order, social change and social emergence, along with voluntaristic versus deterministic patterns of behavior among various units of analysis.

the field. Such a fresh approach possibly improves a wide range of conceptual issues in disasters and hazards. In addition, such an approach would give us insights on how disaster managers, emergency responders, and disaster victims (recognizing that these “roles” may overlap in some cases) see, use and experience time. This, in turn, could assist with a number of applied issues (e.g., warning, effective “response,” priorities in “recovery”) throughout the process of disaster.

Second, I believe that the concept of entrainment could open new doors for understanding post-impact behavior, or the transition from post-impact to pre-impact (or everyday) behavi

The use of social time may also give us a unique view on understanding slow moving disasters (e.g., environmental events, famines and droughts) when compared to sudden impact events. Social time and social disruption provides tools to define disaster without making assessments (i.e., good/bad) of the event.

In this paper I have shown that the application of social time and social disruption to disaster settings (i.e., pre-impact, impact, post-impact) along can provide a unique way to understand disasters. First, by integrating the ideas of event time, social time, and social disruption, we can develop a foundation for creating an empirically based continuum of everyday life/emergency, disaster, and catastrophe. An implication of this approach is that we use specific social criteria (based upon social disruption via the various time concepts) to define the event. As a result, drawing upon social time and social disruption casts a rather wide net in understanding events what we call disa

Disasters might be one of the few natural events that override the socio-temporal order; indeed, damage to the routines of social life is a defining characteristic that separates disasters from local emergencies and other disruption

n particular, we note how recent extensions to Activity Theory have addressed theoretical shortcomings similar to our five challenges and suggest directions for bridging the gap between everyday practice and systems support

These extensions increase the complexity of the Activity Theory model but also help to explain tensions present in real-world systems such as when one agent plays different roles in two systems that have divergent goals. Furthermore, this approach provides Activity Theory with a similar degree of agility in representing complex, distributed cognition as competing theoretical approaches, such as Distributed Cognition (Hutchins, 1995).

The manner in which we isolate supposedly discrete "figures" from their surrounding "ground" is also manifested in the way we come to experience ourselves. 52 It involves a form of mental differ­entiation that entails a fundamental distinction between us and the rest of the world. It is known as our sense of identity.

It is boundaries that help us separate one entity from another: "To classify things is to arrange them in groups ... separated by clearly determined lines of demarcation .... At the bottom of our conception of class there is the idea of a circumscription with fixed and definite outlines. "7 Indeed, the word define derives from the Latin word for boundary, which is finis. To define something is to mark its boundaries, 8 to surround it with a mental fence that sepa­rates it from everything else. As evidenced by our failure to notice objects that are not clearly differentiated from their surroundings, it is their boundaries that allow us to perceive "things" at all.

es an entity with a distinctive meaning5 as well as with a distinctive identity that sets it apart from everything else. The way we cut up the world clearly affects the way we organ

The need to substantiate the way we segment time into discrete blocks also ac­counts for the holidays we create to commemorate critical transition points between historical epochs 112 as well as for the rituals we de­sign to articulate significant changes in our relative access to one another-greetings, first kisses, farewell parties, bedtime stories. 113

Most of the fine lines that separate mental entities from one another are drawn only in our own head and, therefore, totally in­visible. And yet, by playing up the act of "crossing" them, we can make mental discontinuities more "tangible." Many rituals, indeed, are designed specifically to substantiate the mental segmentation of reality into discrete chunks. In articulating our "passage" through the mental partitions separating these chunks from one another, such rituals, originally identified by Arnold Van Gennep as "rites of passage,"107 certainly enhance our experience of discontinuity.

Nonetheless, without some lumping, it would be impossible ever to experience any collectivity, or mental entity for that matter. The ability to ignore the uniqueness of items and regard them as typical members of categories is a prerequisite for classifying any group of phenomena. Such ability to "typify"106 our experience is therefore one of the cornerstones of social reality

A mental field is basically a cluster of items that are more similar to one another than to any other item. Generating such fields, therefore, usually involves some lumping.

Such mental geography has no physical basis but we experience it as if it did

Like them, all frames basically define parts of our percep­tual environment as irrelevant, thus separating that which we attend in a focused manner from all the out-of-frame experience44 that we leave "in the background" and ignore.

A frame is characterized not by its contents but rather by the distinctive way in which it transforms the contents' meaning.

Framing is the act of surrounding situations, acts, or objects with mental brackets35 that basically transform their meaning by defining them as a game, a joke, a symbol, or a fantasy

Crossing the fine lines separating such experiential realms from one another involves a considerable mental switch from one "style" or mode of experiencing to another, as each realm has a distinctive "accent of reality. "30

Temporal differentiation often entails an experience of disconti­nuity among different sorts of reality as well.

Temporal differentiation helps substantiate elusive mental dis­tinctions. Like their spatial counterparts, temporal boundaries often represent mental partitions and thus serve to divide more than just time.

In order to endow the things we perceive with meaning, we normally ignore their uniqueness and regard them as typical mem­bers of a particular class of objects (a relative, a present), acts (an apology, a crime), or events (a game, a conference).2 After all, "If each of the many things in the world were taken as distinct, unique, a thing in itself unrelated to any other thing, perception of the world would disintegrate into complete meaninglessness. "3 Indeed, things become meaningful only when placed in some category.

The perception of supposedly insular chunks of space is probably the most fundamental manifestation of how we divide reality into islands of meaning. Examining how we partition space, therefore, is an ideal way to start exploring how we partition our social world

create the effect of temporal symmetry, of the group sharing a moment, even though individual members clearly read the message at different moments.

The notion of temporal structuring views "real time" not as an inherent property of Internet­based activities, or an inevitable consequence of technol­ogy use, but as an enacted temporal structure, reflecting the decisions people have made about how they wish to structure their activities, both on or off the Internet. As an alternative to the idea of '·real time," Bennett and Wei II ( 1997) have suggested the notion of "real-enough time," proposing that people design their process and technology infrastructures to accommodate variable timing demands, which are contingent on task and context. We believe such "real-enough" temporal structures are important ar­eas of further empirical investigation, allowing us to move beyond the fixation on a singular, objective "real time" to recognize the opportunities people have to (re)shape the range of temporal structures that shape their lives.

The notion of temporal structuring we have de­veloped here suggests instead that people enact multiple, heterogeneous, and shifting temporal structures in all as­pects of their lives.

Our empirical example also highlighted the value of achieving virtual temporal symmetry for members of a geographically dispersed community. As electronic me­dia become increasingly central to organizational life, in­dividuals may use asynchronous media in various ways to shape devices of virtual symmetry that help them co­ordinate across geographical distance and across multiple temporal structures. This suggests that when studying the use of electronic media, researchers should pay attention to the conditions in which virtual temporal symmetry may be enacted to coordinate distributed activities, and with what consequences. Interesting questions for empirical research include the following. As work groups in orga­nizations become more geographically dispersed and/or more dependent on electronic media, do members enact virtual temporal symmetry for certain purposes? If so, for which types of purposes? And how? If not, how do such work groups achieve temporal coordination?

By examining a community's repertoire of temporal struc­tures, we can understand the variety of ways in which community members' actions (re)produce the different temporal structures they constitute through their ongoing practices

The notion of temporal structuring focuses attention on what people actually do temporally in their practices, and how in such ongoing and situated activity they shape and are shaped by particular temporal structures. By exam­ining when people do what they do in their practices, we can identify what temporal structures shape and are shaped (often concurrently) by members of a community; how these interact; whether they are interrelated, over­lapping, and nested, or separate and distinct; and the ex­tent to which they are compatible, complementary, or contradictory.

In all these cases, the notion of temporal structuring through ongoing practices helps us understand and bridge the temporal oppositions underlying the research litera­ture. We tum now to an empirical example to demonstrate how this perspective can offer a new understanding of the temporal conditions and consequences of organizational life.

In practice, however. an open-ended or closed temporal orientation is not a stable property of occupational groups, but an emergent property of the temporal structures being enacted at a given moment by the groups' members.

Viewed from a practice perspective, the distinction be­tween cyclic and linear time blurs because it depends on the observer's point of view and moment of observation. In particular cases, simply shifting the observer's vantage point (e.g., from the corporate suite to the factory floor) or changing the period of observation (e.g., from a week to a year) may make either the cyclic or the linear aspect of ongoing practices more salient.

An emphasis on the cyclic temporality of organizational life also underpins the work on entrain­ment, developed in the natural sciences and gaining cur­rency in organization studies. Defined as "the adjustment of the pace or cycle of one activity to match or synchro­nize with that of another" (Ancona and Chong 1996, p. 251 ), entrainment has been used to account for a variety of organizational phenomena displaying coordinated or synchronized temporal cycles (Ancona and Chong 1996, Clark 1990, Gersick 1994, McGrath 1990).

In spite of the general movement from particular to­wards universal notions of time (Castells 1996, Giddens 1990, Zerubavel 1981 ), we can see that in use, all uni versa! temporal structures must be particularized to local contexts because they are enacted through the situated practices of specific community members in specific locations and time zones.

One such op­position is that between universal (global, standardized, acontextual) and particular (local, situated, context­specific) time.

Table 1 Different Perspectives on Time in Organizations

That is, people are purposive, knowledgeable, adaptive, and inventive ac­tors who, while they are shaped by established temporal structures, can also choose (whether explicitly or implic­itly) to (re)shape those temporal structures to accomplish their situated and dynamic ends.

scholars have begun to recognize the importance of what Nowotny (1992, p. 424) has termed pluritemporalism­"the existence of a plurality of different modes of social time(s) which may exist side by side." Our structuring lens sees this not so much as the existence of multiple times, but as the ongoing constitution of multiple tem­poral structures in people"s everyday practices.

Like social structures in general (Giddens 1984 ), tem­poral structures simultaneously constrain and enable.

While adopting one side or the other of this dichotomy may offer re­searchers analytic advantages in their temporal studies of organizations, difficulties arise when these positions are treated-not as conceptual tools-but as inherent prop­erties of time. Focusing on one side or the other misses seeing how temporal structures emerge from and are em­bedded in the varied and ongoing social practices of peo­ple in different communities and historical periods, and at the same time how such temporal structures powerfully shape those practices in turn. By focusing on what or­ganizational members actually do, our practice-based per­spective on temporal structuring may offer new insights into how people construct and reconstruct the temporal conditions that shape their lives.

Event time, in contrast, is conceived as "qualitative time-heterogeneous, discontinuous, and unequivalent when different time periods are compared" (Starkey

Thus temporal structures, like all social structures (Giddens 1984), are both the medium and the outcome of people's recurrent practices.

Our purpose in this paper is to develop the basic out­lines of an alternative perspective on time in organiza­tions that is centered on people's recurrent practices that shape (and are shaped by) a set of temporal structures. We see this emphasis on human practices (as distinct from external force or subjective construction) as bridg­ing the current opposition between objective and subjec­tive conceptualizations of time, and thus as making pos­sible a new understanding of the temporal conditions and consequences of organizational life. By grounding our perspective in the dynamic capacities of human agency we believe we gain unique insights into the creation, use, and influence of time in organizations.

This in­tegration suggests that time is instantiated in organiza­tional life through a process of temporal structuring,1 where people (re)produce (and occasionally change) tem­poral structures to orient their ongoing activities.

In this paper we explicitly integrate the notion of social practices from this literature with that of enacted struc­tures drawn from the theory of structuration (Giddens 1984 ), arguing that the combination can be valuable for the study of organizations in general and of time in or­ganizations in particular. With respect to the latter, we have obtained important insights into how temporality is both produced in situated practices and reproduced through the influence of institutionalized norms.

We contribute to this discussion within organizational re­search by offering an alternative third view-that time is experienced in organizational life through a process of temporal structuring that characterizes people's everyday engagement in the world. As part of this engagement, people produce and reproduce what can be seen to be temporal structures to guide, orient, and coordinate their ongoing activities.

researchers explore the embodied. embedded. and mate­rial aspects of human agency in constituting particular social orders (Hutchins 1995, Lave 1988, Suchman 1987).

emporal structures here are under­stood as both shaping and being shaped by ongoing hu­man action, and thus as neither independent of human action (because shaped in action), nor fully determined by human action (because shaping that action). Such a view allows us to bridge the gap between objective and subjective understandings of time by recognizing the ac­tive role of people in shaping the temporal contours of their lives, while also acknowledging the way in which people's actions are shaped by structural conditions out­side their immediate control.

People are often thrown into pre-existing, organized action patterns. They experience the middle of a narrative but only the vaguest beginnings or ends. Without those boundaries people dwell in antenarrative. But that is where sense-making, organizing, and discursive devices make a difference. ‘People who are thrown establish their own temporality’ (Hernes and Maitlis, 2010: 31)

‘Antenarrative is the fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted and pre-narrative speculation, a bet’ (Boje, 2001: 1). Organizing, in the context of antenarrative, is a bet that these fragments will have become orderly and that efforts to impose temporality

‘Antenarrative is the fragmented,non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted, and pre-narrative speculation, a bet. To traditional narrativemethods antenarrative is an improper storytelling awager that a proper narrative can be constituted’(Boje 2001, p. 1).

Sixth, investi-gating the use of temporal modalities in making andgiving sense in the storytelling of management andother occupational groups, for example, in processesof story-weaving in the assembly of smaller storiesthat variously draw from the past, present and future(see Maitlis 2005, p. 45; Reissner and Pagan 2013,pp. 52, 83)

Fifth, the importance of shifting contextualconditions over chronological time in the rewritingof histories and the reconstruction of narratives thatreposition individuals and groups, in, for example,a movement from hero to villain (see Cunliffe andCoupland 2012; Godfreyet al. 2016).

Fourth, the com-pression and expansion of time structures in storiesthat compete, and the different techniques for draw-ing on temporal modalities for sensemaking in theconstruction of compelling power-political narrativesthat seek to influence the sense giving of others (seeBuchanan and Dawson 2007; Dawson and Buchanan2012)

Third, the use of time and temporality for mak-ing and giving sense to unfinalized stories, antenar-ratives and future scenarios (see Boje 2011), includ-ing attention to issues, such as temporal depth, timeurgency and temporal orientation in promoting theneed for short or long-term strategies (see Jabri 2016,p. 97; Kunischet al. 2017, p. 1043)

Second, howtime is variously used in past constructions that givesense to what has occurred, in for example, nostal-gic tales that seek to sustain identity-relevant valuesand beliefs, or using time to leverage reformulationsin repositioning these tales, for example, with theaim of undermining nostalgia as a platform for resis-tance (see Brown and Humphreys 2002; Strangleman1999).

First, exam-ination of time representations in the more finalizedand structured stories in organizations (see Gabriel2000): for example, how time and temporality areused to convey a particular message, moral lesson orpresent a causal explanation that is both compellingand plausible.

Our discussion commences with a fourfold charac-terization of underlying temporal modalities fromwhich we extend six pathways in mapping out fu-ture research opportunities.

Boudes and Laroche (2009) attend to narra-tive sensemaking in post-crisis inquiry reports inanalysing the foreseeability of the deaths that oc-curred following the heat wave in France in 2003.They identify a tendency towards simplification andreductionism, but suggest that, rather than represent-ing a linear temporal sequence in which recommen-dations follow explanation, ‘the story is built at leastpartially around preferred lessons and the desiredrecommendations for action’ (Boudes and Laroche2009, p. 392).

This returns us to Weick’s (2012) claimthat the unfinalized uncertainties of life experiences ismade sense of and temporally fixed in narrative ratio-nality, but with the added notion that these temporalconstructions build on prospective ideas (a non-lineartemporality in story construction, but not in the struc-ture of the final narrative).

As the authors note: ‘Sensemaking is tempo-ral in at least two ways: in the moment of performancewe draw on past experiences, present interactions andfuture anticipations, and second, we plot narrative co-herence across time’ (Cunliffe and Coupland 2012,p. 83).

However, in their study focusing on theimportance of time to sensemaking in crisis situa-tions, Combe and Carrington (2015) point out thatmost studies still remain focused on objective clocktime with little attempt to examine the influence ofthe subjective experience of the past or how leadersimagine the future may affect how they interpret andmake sense of the present

Al-though both scholars usefully illustrate the powerof narratives to make and give sense to experiencesin organizations, Gabriel (2000) adopts a folkloristposition with a reliance on conventional temporal-ity and sequenced event time, in which causality isbuilt into the narrative construction with a progres-sive temporality (beginning, middle and end). In con-trast, Boje (2011) is interested in the more fragmentedand terse stories and the ways in which these un-resolved narratives open up possibilities for poten-tial futures (prospective sensemaking).

As Bojeet al. (2016a, p. 395)indicate, through situating antenarratives in subjec-tive time, they are able to show ‘how diverse voicesinterconnect, embed and entangle in organizationalstrategies’.

Boje seeks to elevate the place ofstories in organization studies in examining the inter-play between the control of narrative (order) and theunfinalized nature of emergent story (disorder)

For Boje (2008,p. 1) narrative has served to present reality in an or-dered fashion (the arrow of time), whereas storiesare at times able to break out of this narrative orderand offer a more diverse, fragmented and muddledview of reality (non-linear temporality). He refers toa storytelling organization as a ‘collective storytellingsystem in which the performance of stories is a keypart of members’ sensemaking and a means to allowthem to supplement individual memories with insti-tutional memory’ (Boje 1991, p. 106).

From Boje’s perspective, coherent narrativesbuilt on retrospective sensemaking serve to controland regulate, while living stories in the present (asin simultaneous storytelling) disperse and challenge,providing alternative interpretations, with antenarra-tives offering future possibilities through prospectivesensemaking

From thisfolklorist perspective, sequenced event time predom-inates, and conventional temporality is not called intoquestion, and yet there remain subtle and differentconceptions of time, sometimes continuous, some-times discontinuous, sometimes linear and sometimestimeless, that extend beyond a simple characterizationof Newtonian linear-time.

Coherent, finalized stories are embedded with alinear structure that aligns with clock time and theGregorian calendar (Gabriel 2000, p. 239). Chronol-ogy and objective time implant these stories withan identifiable past, present and future and a linearcausality that provides a temporal structure (a be-ginning, middle and end with plot and characters).This linearity is tied to the inviolability of sequencedevents that occur within a tensed notion of time where,for example, you cannot have a character seeking re-venge before an original insult has occurred, nor canyou have a punishment for a crime that will be com-mitted later.

For Gabriel, stories are a subset of narratives (whileall stories are narratives, not all narratives are stories),arguing that theories, statistics, reports or documentsthat describe events and seek to present objective factsshould not be treated as stories (nor for that mattershould clich ́es), as stories interpret events often dis-torting, omitting and embellishing to engage audienceemotions, they generate, sustain, destroy and under-mine meaning, and while they are crafted along par-ticular lines they do not obliterate the facts (Gabriel2000, pp. 3–4).

A key comparative difference centreson their definition and approach to stories. Gabrielis concerned with completed coherent stories with abeginning, middle and end, whereas Boje examinesunfinalized stories and future-oriented sensemaking.Temporality is central to both and yet, as we willillustrate, concepts of time remain implicit and inad-equately theorized.

Thissupported the common claim that, in organizationalresearch, time usually remains hidden or implicit andis seldom discussed explicitly (Roeet al. 2009).

From these readings, a com-mon and persistent claim centred on the general ab-sence of conceptual thinking about time and tempo-rality (Berends and Antonacopoulou 2014; Dawsonand Sykes 2016)

This dominant linear view of temporality drawnfrom conventional representations of clock time (dig-itally embedded in a range of everyday devices) hasbeen widely criticized (Adam 1990, 2004; Glennieand Thrift 1996; Thrift 2004; Wajcman 2015), witha growing recognition of the need to bring differen-tiated concepts of time to the fore (see Christens-sonet al. 2014). There is a small but expandingcall to move beyond objective time (Allmanet al.2014) and time-free research (Hassard 1990b, p. 1)or timeless knowledge (Roeet al. 2009) to a moreconceptually informed theorization in which conceptsof time are made more explicit and openly discussed(Anconaet al. 2001b; Bluedorn 2002; Dawson andSykes 2016; Goodmanet al. 2001).

This review highlights how conventional explanations in these related fields of studyare underpinned by linear conceptions of temporality (with an associated causality)and how there is growing recognition of fluidity in the way pasts and futures cometogether in temporal sensemaking of an emergent present.

ClassicAristotelian narratives with a linear time structure (stories with a beginning, middle andend) are prominent in the storytelling literature, whereas retrospection, in drawing onthe past in making sense of the present, is a temporal modality central to foundationalconcepts of sensemaking. In examining time and temporality in these related fields,the authors show how the conventional temporal sequence of a past, present and futuredominates, with little consideration being given to time as a multiple rather than singularconcept

These possibili- ties are more likely to be seen if we think of large crises as the outcome of smaller scale enactments. When the enactment perspective is applied to crisis situations, several aspects stand out that are normally overlooked. To look for enactment themes in crises, for example, is to listen for verbs of enactment, words like manual control, intervene, cope, probe, alter, design, solve, decouple, try, peek and poke (Perrow, 1984, p. 333), talk, disregard, and improvise. These verbs may signify actions that have the potential to construct or limit later stages in an unfolding crisis

Theway organizational membersinterpret or situate themselves in time and embrace time-related concepts such as of time scarcity, urgency, orientation. ‘temporal construals inform and are informed by intersubjective, subjective and objective times.’ (R. A. Roe et al., 2009

mporal features. We have then to consider how organizational participants are affected by situations containing temporal features, but also how these actors shape, by their behavior and beliefs, local context according to their needs.

To this extent, we have made tremendous advancements but we are still lacking reliable findings of the consistency and magnitude of the time effects at each level of an organization and on individuals. Perhaps, the last progresses that drawn upon the sructuration theory (Gomez, 2009; Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013; Wanda J. Orlikowski & Yates, 2002; Reinecke & Ansari, 2015; Rowell, Gustafsson, & Clemente, 2016) has suffered the same faith of being judged as too notional and not providing enough guidance on how to conduct empirical studies based on this conception.

empirical literature on organizational time has extended research on time as a control variable of boundary condition (George & Jones, 2000; Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, & Van de Ven, 2013)

Events have a time span; actions have a time frame that highlights the urgency of (continuously) deepening our knowledge of time as a key component of organizations (Bleijenbergh, Gremmen, & Peters, 2016). In

But time is a complex and a sensitive topic in reason to the different vantage points; and its meaning often tends to be taken for granted and given commonsense or self-evident attributions (Sahay, 1997).

A promising approach that addresses some worker output issues examines the way that workers do their work rather than the output itself, using machine learning and/or visualization to predict the quality of a worker’s output from their behavior [119,120]

Many tasks worth completing require cooperation –yet crowdsourcing has largely focused on independent work. Distributed teams have always facedchallenges in cultural differences and coordination[60], but crowd collaboration now must createrapport over much shorter timescales(e.g., one hour) and possibly wider culturalor socioeconomic gaps

The two core challenges for realtime crowdsourcing will be 1) scaling upto increased demand for realtime workers, and 2) making workers efficient enough to collectively generateresultsahead of time deadlines.

There is also a need for mechanisms to support transformations and processesover time, both for scientific data and scientific ideas. These mechanisms should not only help the user visualize but also express time and change.

Compared to paper artifacts such as laboratory notebooks, computer files do not offer a proper structure to manage temporal and evolutive data.

Paper holds temporal properties which are not yet integrated in computer.

Contrary to paper notes, computer files do not display the traces or versions that led to their final state.

Blog tools are designed as publishing tools; they do not support iterative thinking the way paper notebooks do.

As researchers explore different projects, it is difficult to put order in their ideas, their framing changes andtransitions or regrouping occur [figure 1] (time as change). When the projects are over, defined, researchers can refer to them as a whole and situate them in time (time as order).

At a higher level, with their roadmaps and deadlines, projects also hold a temporal dimension.

This is related to the fact that biology researchers are in a creative process and reflect on their decisions in order to explore new leads or justify their decisions. Paper laboratory notebooks show this temporality ofthoughts.

We illustrate how the time as change paradigm helps to better capture the dynamic aspects of their data through three types of data temporality: TODO lists, reflective activity (biology research) and project management.

Temporal data can thus be described either as data having time attributes, or data needing a dynamic description, acknowledging data temporal dimension - what we call temporality.

This corresponds to a classical and quite well-established distinction in the history of ideas: time as order, and time as change [Wolff 2004].

Time as order considers temporal data as data that can be described by a time attribute, which can improve navigation or organization. Time as change considers temporal data as data that evolve over time.

Temporal Data and Data Temporality: Time is change, not only ord

While Activity Theory provides a useful lens for understanding users’ work practices and a language for communicating models of users’ behavior, there are some aspects of work practice that have been shown to be critical for knowledge work but are not captured in the Activity Theory framework. For example, knowledge workers have been shown to rely on the organization of information used in ongoing activities to accomplish their work, particularly when the value or role of that information has not yet been fully determined (Kidd, 1994; Malone, 1983; Mynatt, 1999). Activity Theory alludes to the fact that tools reflect the history of their use, but does not place a strong emphasis on this critical component of knowledge work.

s a means for coordinating action among groups of users (e.g., Bardram, 2005, this volume)

The hierarchical structure of the Boer et al. adaptation of the Activity Theory model can help to reconcile the differences in granularity and the difficulties of supporting collaboration identified in our work; future activity-centered user interfaces might take advantage of the zoomable user interface paradigm or feature control over the level of detail (LOD) represented in the interface to more accurately reflect the depth at which a given user conceptualizes their own tasks or the tasks of their colleagues.

Activity Theory casts a wide but well-defined net around the multifaceted nature of activity, suggesting that the user’s colleagues and the object of the activity are of the utmost importance, but that the tools, social rules, and roles of collaborators within the community must also be reflected back to the user as critical components of that activity. The idea that components of activity reflect their history of use through time suggest several ways for activity-centered systems to support a dynamic working landscape; for example, they might capture past activities in an archive for quick—and potentially automated—reference during related tasks in the future, and that the tools used in previous and ongoing activities (e.g., documents and information resources) both be available at all times and tagged with meta-information about how they have been used in the past

Engeström (1987) provides a classic visualization summarizing the structure of an activity (figure 3). This model is based around three mutual relationships: that between the actor (subject) and the community (other actors involved), that between subject and the object (in the sense of objective) of the activity, and that between the object and the community. These mutual relationships are mediated by the other components of activity.

Activity Theory is described both as a guiding framework for analyzing observations of work practice and a language for communicating those findings within the community of practitioners (Halverson, 2001).

Nardi (1996) argues that one of the inherent strengths of Activity Theory is in its ability to capture the idea of context in user models for HCI, a notion that is gaining momentum particularly with respect to the ubiquitous computing paradigm and as its own design movement, so-called activity-centered design (Gay & Hembrooke, 2003). The world that Gay and Hembrooke envision relies upon design that is not user-centered (which is currently the dominant view in the HCI community) but activity-centered, since Activity Theory provides the right “orientation” for future classes of interactions mediated by ubiquitous computing devices.

Besides the fact that an activity is situated in a network of influencing activity systems, it is also situated in time....In order to understand the activity system under investigation, one therefore has to reveal its temporal interconnectedness....Rather than analyzing an activity system as a static picture of reality, the developments and tensions within the activity system need to be

However, Gay and Hembrooke point out a weakness in the original formulation of Activity Theory: “The model of activity theory...has traditionally been understood as a synchronic, point-in-time depiction of an activity. It does not depict the transformational and developmental processes that provide the focus of much recent activity theory research” (Gay & Hembrooke, 2003).

In their well-known “activity checklist,” Kaptelinin, Nardi, and Macaulay (1999) identified five basic principles of Activity Theory: 1.Hierarchical structure of activity In Activity Theory, the unit of analysis is an activity which is directed at an objectthat motivates the activity. Activities are composed of conscious, goal-directed actions; different actions may be taken to complete any given goal. Actions are implemented through automatic operations, which do not have goals of their own. This hierarchical structure is dynamic and can change throughout the life of an activity. 2.Object-orientedness Activity Theory holds that humans exist in an broadly-defined objective reality, that is, the things around us have properties that are objective both to the natural sciences and society and culture. 3.Internalization/externalization Activity Theory considers both internal and external actions and holds that the two are tightly interrelated. Internalization is the process of transforming an external process into an internal one for the purposes of planning or simulating an action without affecting the world. Externalization transforms internal actions into external ones and is often used to resolve failures of internal actions and to coordinate actions among independent agents. 4.Mediation A central tenet of Activity Theory is that activity is mediated by tools, and that these tools are created and transformed over the course of the activity so that the culture and history of the activity becomes embedded in the tools. Vygotsky’s definition of tool is very broad; one of the tools he was most interested in was language. 5.Development Activity Theory relies upon development as one of its primary research methodologies; that is, “experiments” often include consist of a subject’s participation in an activity and observation of developmental changes in the subject over the course of the activity. Ethnographic methods that identify the cultural and historical roots of activity are also frequently used.

Activity Theory places a strong focus on the mediating role of tools and social practices in the service of accomplishing goals

In particular, the fact that most users are only now beginning to experience the ubicomp vision and integrate this new, unique class of technology into their work practices suggests that another change in focus may be on the horizon: “[T]he shift from user-centered design to context-based design corresponds with recent developments in pervasive, ubiquitous computing networks and in the appliances that connect with them, which are radically changing our relationships with personal computing devices” (Gay & Hembrooke, 2003)

Over the last decade, the focus of the HCI community began to shift away from the quantitative evaluation of user interfaces based on cognitive models and towards more ecologically informed techniques, including contextual and participatory design (Beyer & Holtzblatt, 1998; Kyng, 1994). This “user-centered design” movement foregrounded the social context of technology use and incorporated user feedback and participation throughout the design process.

Historically, HCI adopted and adapted knowledge, processes and techniques from artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive science, and cognitive psychology in service of understanding and modeling user behavior, and applied those findings to the creation of new interfaces and technologies through design practice. As a result of this lineage, many of the theories and techniques used in HCI to model users have exhibited a markedly cognitive, “agents as information processors” flavor. As a result, much of the research literature on user modeling in HCI has been based on the Model Human Processor (Card, Moran & Newell, 1983), which has its roots in the physical symbol system hypothesis.

Activities also span place; that is, it is common for work to take place outside of the immediate office environment. However, current office technologies sometimes present a very different view of information across different physical and virtual settings.

The idea that activities may exist at different levels of granularity is not a new one. Boer, van Baalen & Kumar (2002) provide a model explaining how an activity at one level of analysis may be modeled as an action—a component of an activity—at another. This holds true for individual users, as in the example provided above, but is even more pronounced when a single activity is viewed from multiple participants’ perspectives.

Additionally, activities need to be represented in such a way that their contents can be shared, with the caveats that individual participants in an activity may have very different perceptions of the activity, they may bring different resources to play over the course of the activity, and, particularly for large activities in which many individual users participate, users themselves may come and go over the life of the activity.

Recognizing the mediating role of the digital work environment in enabling users to meaningfully collaborate is a critical step to ensuring the success of these systems.

User studies and intuition both suggest that the activities that a knowledge worker engages in change—sometimes dramatically—over time. Projects and milestones come and go, and the tools and information resources used within an activity often change over time as well. Furthermore, activities completed in the past and their outcomes often impact activities in the present, and ongoing activities will, in turn, affect activities that will be undertaken in the future. Capturing activity over the course of time has long been a problem for desktop computing.

Supporting the multifaceted aspects of activity in a ubicomp environment becomes a much more complex proposition. If activity is to be used as a unifying organizational structure across a wide variety of devices such as traditional desktop and laptop computers, PDAs, mobile telephones, personal-server style devices (Want et al., 2002), shared public displays, etc., then those devices must all be able to share a common set of activity representations and use those representations as the organizational cornerstone for the user experience they provide. Additionally, the activity representations must be versatile enough to encompass the kinds of work for which each of these kinds of devices are used

The challenges exist due in large part to the inherent complexity of human activity, the technical affordances of the computing tools used in work practice, and the nature of (and culture surrounding) knowledge work.

knowledge workers—business professionals who interpret and transform information (Drucker, 1973).

We describe five challenges for matching computation to activity. These are: •Activities are multifaceted, involving a heterogeneous collection of work artifacts; •Activities are dynamic, emphasizing the continuation and evolution of work artifacts in contrast to closure and archiving; •Activities are collaborative, in the creation, communication, and dissemination of work artifacts; •Activities exist at different levels of granularity, due to varying durations, complexity and ownership; and •Activities exist across places, including physical boundaries, virtual boundaries of information security and access, and fixed and mobile settings.

In order to endow the things we perceive with meaning, we normally ignore their uniqueness and regard them as typical mem-bers of a particular class of objects (a relative, a present), acts (an apology, a crime), or events (a game, a conference).

Nature has been incorporated into social theorizing only in as far as it either has become an object to which meaning is attributed and which hence figures as part of human reflexivity, as object met with emotions or attitudes; or, it is seen as an object of transformation by those forces which act upon it: economic forces, but foremost forces emanating from science and technology. The natural environment, including the biosphere and a multitude of environmental risks which have come to the fore today, negate clear-cut boundaries between the effects of human intervention, and hence agency, and synergistic processes which are 'natural' but still a result of human interaction with the environment. Time, it has been emphasized, is not only embedded in symbolic meaning or intersubjective social relations but also in artifacts, in natural and in culturally made ones. Likewise, the ongoing transformation and endangering of the natural environment is performed by processes which are chemical and atmospheric, biological and physical. But they all interact with social processes tied to energy production and use, modes of food production and land utilization, demographic pressures and possible interferences through use of tech-nology.

This means also that the predominantly linear time is comp-lemented by greater awareness of cyclical times and temporal routines which are overlapping each other.

Social identities have increasing difficulty in being construed in terms of stable social attributes in a highly mobile -both socially and geographically - society. They will have to rely on other, temporal dimensions, in what are becoming increasingly precari-ous, if not completely contingent, identities in constant need of redefi-nition. One's 'own', proper time situated in a momentous present which is extended on the societal level in order to accommodate the pressing overload of problems, choices and strategies, becomes a central value for the individual as well as a characteristic of the societal system (Nowotny, 1989a)

Major societal transformations are linked to information and communication technologies, giving rise to processes of growing global interdependence. They in turn generate the approxi-mation of coevalness, the illusion of simultaneity by being able to link instantly people and places around the globe. Many other processes are also accelerated. Speed and mobility are thus gaining in momentum, leading in turn to further speeding up processes that interlink the move-ment of people, information, ideas and goods.

ut it will also have to come to terms with confronting 'the Other' (Fabian, 1983), with 'the curious asymmetry' still prevailing as a result of advanced industrial societies receiving a mainly endogenous and synchronic analytic treatment, while 'developing' societies are often seen in exogenous, diachronic terms. Study of 'Time and the Other' presupposes, often implicitly, that the Other lives in another time, or at least on a different time-scale. And indeed, when looking at the integrative but also potentially divisive 'timing' facilitated by modern communication and information-processing technology, is it not correct to say that new divisions, on a temporal scale, are being created between those who have access to such devices and those who do not? Is not one part of humanity, despite globalization, in danger of being left behind, in a somewhat anachronistic age?

only structural functional theory, but all postfunctionalist 'successor' theories for their lack in taking up 'substantive' temporal issues, he was also pleading from the selective point of view of Third World countries for the exploration of theoretically possible alternatives or, to put it into other words, the delineation of what in the experience of western and non-western societies so far is universally valid and yet historically restric-ted. Such questions touch the very essence of the process of moderniz-ation. They evoke images of a closed past and an open or no longer so open future, of structures of collective memory as well as shifting collec-tive and individual identities of people who are increasingly drawn into the processes of world-wide integration and globalization. Anthropologi-cal accounts are extremely rich in different time reckoning modes and systems, in the pluritemporalism that prevailed in pre-industrialized societies. The theory of historical time - or times - both from a western and non-western point of view still has to be written. There exists already an impressive corpus of writings analysing the rise of the new dominant 'western' concept of time and especially its links with the process of industrialization. The temporal representations underlying the different disciplines in the social sciences allow not only for a reconceptualization of their division of intellectual labour, but also for a programmatic view forward towards a 'science of multiple times' (Grossin, 1989). However, any such endeavour has to come to terms also with non-western temporal experience.

Time' and time research is not ·an institutionalized subfield or subspeciality of any of the social sciences. By its very nature, it is recalcitrantly transdisciplinary and refuses to be placed under the intellectual monopoly of any discipline. Nor is time sufficiently recognized as forming an integral dimension of any of the more permanent structural domains of social life which have led to their institutionalization as research fields. Although research grants can be obtained for 'temporal topics', they are much more likely to be judged as relevant when they are presented as part of an established research field, such as studies of working time being considered a legit-imate part of studies of working life or industrial relations.

The standardization of local times into standard world time is one of the prime examples for the push towards standardization and integration also on the temporal scale (Zerubavel, 1982).

At present, information and communication technologies con-tinue to reshape temporal experience and collective time consciousness (Nowotny, 1989b)

Despite the apparent diversity of themes, certain common patterns can be discerned in empirical studies dealing with time. They bear the imprint of the ups and downs of research fashions as well as the waxing and waning of influences from neighbouring disciplines. But they all acknowledge 'time as a problem' in 'time-compact' societies (Lenntorp, 1978), imbued with the pressures of time that come from time being a scarce resource.

Studies of time in organizations have long since recognized the importance of 'events' as a complex admixture which shapes social life inside an organiz-ation and its relationship to the outside world. 'Sociological analyses', we are told, 'require a theory of time which recognizes that time is a socially constructed, organizing device by which one set, or trajectory of events is used as a point of reference for understanding, anticipating and attempting to control other sets of events. Time is in the events and events are defined by organizational members' (Clark, 1985:36).

The tension between action theory (or the theory of structuration) and sys-tems theory has not completely vanished, but at least the areas of dis-agreement have become clearer. The 'event' structure of time with its implicit legitimization through physics, but which is equally a central notion for historians (Grossin, 1989) holds a certain attraction for empiri-cal studies and for those who are interested in the definitional

The formation of time con epts and the making of time I measurements, i.e. the production of devices as well as their use and social function, become for him a problem of social knowledge and its formation. It is couched in the long-term perspective of evolution of human societies. Knowledge about time is not knowledge about an invariant part or object of nature. Time is not a quality inherent in things, nor invariant across human societies.

As can be seen by these and other theor~tical formulations, the prob-lem of time in social theory, while gradu~ ly coming to new terms with social action, does not lend itself easily 'to providing bridges for the agents behind human agency, the social actors, nor to those who do empirical research in order to understand the world from an actor's perspective.

As Bergmann (1981), and more recently, Ltischer (1989) and Adam (1990) and before them Joas (1980, 1989) have shown, a radical change in perspective away from time as 'flow' or time as embedded in the intentionality of the actor, can already be found in the social philosophy of time by G. H. Mead (Mead, 1936, 1932/1959, 1964). His is also a theory in which it is not the actor and his/her motives, interests or the means-ends scheme which dominates, but where action is interpreted as event -moreover, an event which is both temporal and social in nature.

The gulf separating social theory from its concretization in specific empirically accessible situations is therefore still a wide one.

Action is but the constant intervention of humans into the natural and social world of events. Giddens adds that he would also like to make clear the constitutive relation between time and action. 'I do not' he says, 'equate action with intentionality, but action starts always from an intentionally-oriented actor, who orients him/herself just as much in the past, as he/she tries to realize plans for the future. In this sense, I believe, action can only be analyzed, if one recognizes its embeddedness in the temporal dimension' (Kiessling, 1988:289).

To show 'how the positioning of actors in contexts of interaction and the interlacing of those contexts themselves' relate to broader aspects of social systems, Giddens proposes that social theory should confront 'in a concrete rather than an abstractly philosophical way' the situatedness of interaction in time and space (Giddens, 1984:110)

It may well be, as Edmond Wright has pointed out (personal communi-cation) that by leaving sui generis time to the physicists, i.e. by leaving it out of social theory altogether, there is the risk of losing sight of the 'real' temporal continuum which serves as standard reference for all other forms of times. It also impedes coming to terms with 'time embedded' in natural objects and technical artifacts, as Hagerstrand (1974, 1975, 1988) repeatedly emphasized.

The fundamen-tal question for Giddens then becomes how social systems 'come to be stretched across time and space' (i.e. how they constitute their tempor-ality (Giddens, 1984).

quite different and much more radical approach is followed by Niklas Luhmann, who proposes to replace the subject/ action scheme by a time/action scheme, thus eliminating the actors alto-gether and replacing them with expectations and attributions.

To introduce time into present-day social theory means at its core to redefine its relation to social action and subsequently to human agency. It is there that the central questions arise, where differences begin to matter between action theory, structuration theory and system theory with regard to time.

he third strategy is the unen-cumbered embracing of pluritemporalism. With or without awareness that the concept of an absolute (Newtonian) physical time broke down irrevocably at the turn of this century and that a different kind of plurit-emporalism has also been spreading in the physical sciences (Prigogine and Stengers, 1988; Hawking, 1988; Adam, 1990), social theory is free to posit the existence of a plurality of times, including a plurality of social times. In most cases this amounts to a kind of 'theoretical agnosti-cism' with regard to physical time. Pluritemporalism allows for asserting the existence of social time next to physical ( or biological) time without going into differences of emergence, constitution or epistemological

Another strategy in dealing with sui generis time consists in juxtaposing clock time to the various forms of 'social time' and considers the latter as the more 'natural' ones, i.e. closer to subjective perceptions of time, or to the temporality that results from adaptations to seasons or other kinds of natural (biological, environmental) rhythm. This strategy, often couched also in terms of an opposition between 'linear' clock time and 'cyclical' time of natural and social rhythms devalues, or at least ques-tions, the temporality of formal organizations which rely heavily on clock time in fulfilling their coordinative and integrative and controlling functions (Young, 1988; Elchardus, 1988).

Searching to reconcile Darwinian evolutionary theory with Einsteinian relativity theory and, especially, its reconceptualization of simultaneity, Mead followed Whitehead's lead in locating the origins of all structuration of time in the notion of the 'event': without the interruption of the flow of time by events, no temporal experience would be possible (Joas, 1980, 1989)

Related to this encounter of the first kind, in which social theory meets the concept of time, is the question of the relationship between time in social systems with other forms of (physical, biological, 'natural') time or, as Elchardus calls it, 'sui generis time' (Elchardus, 1988).

By clarifying the concept of time as a conceptual symbol of evolving complex relationships between continua of changes of various kinds, Elias opens the way for grounding the concept of time again in social terms. The power of choosing the symbols, of selecting which continua are to be used, be it by priests or scientists, also beconies amenable to social analysis. The social matrix becomes ready once more to house the natural world or our conception of it in terms of its own, symbol-creating and continuously evolving capacity. The question of human agency is solved in Norbert Elias's case by referring to the process of human evolution through which men and women are enabled to devise symbols of increasing power of abstraction which are 'more adequate to reality'.

Unless one learns to perceive human societies, living in a world of symbols of their own making, as emerging and developing within the larger non-human universe, one is unable to attack one of the most crucial aspects of the problem of time. For Elias it consists, stated very briefly, in how to reconcile the highly abstract nature of the concept of time with the strong compulsion its social use as a regulatory device exerts upon us in daily life. His answer: time is not a thing, but a relationship. For him the word time is a symbol for a relationship which a group of beings endowed with the capacity for memory and synthesis establishes between two or more continua of changes, one of which is used by them as a frame of reference or standard of measurement for the other.

A definition of social time, like the one I attempted myself in the early 1970s, according to which the term social time 'refers to the experience of inter-subjective time created through social interaction, both on the behavioural and symbolic plane' now calls for a much more encompassing and dynamic definition, taking into account also the plurality of social times (Nowotny, 1975:326)

Martins draws a distinction between two criteria of temporalism and/or historicism. One he calls 'thematic tem-poralism', indicated by the degree to which temporal aspects of social life, diachronicity, etc., are taken seriously as themes for reflection of meta theoretical inquiry. The other criterion is the degree or level of 'substantive temporalism', the degree to which becoming, process or diachrony are viewed as ontological grounds for socio-cultural life or as methodologically prior to structural synchronic analysis or explanations.

There is also a widespread acknowledgement, especially in evidence in the empirical literature, of what I will call 'pluritemporalism'. This is an acknowledgement of the existence of a plurality of different modes of social time(s) which may exist side by side, and yet are to be distinguished from the time of physics or that of biology.

The demise of structural-functionalism, he argues, has not brought about a substantial increment in the degree of temporalism and historicism in the theoretical constructs of general sociology, even though this was one of the major goals announced by the critics of functionalism, paramount to a meta-theoretical criterion of what an 'adequate' theory should con-sist of.

The question is, rather, why the repeated complaint about the neglect of time in social theory or in the social sciences in general?

Sorokin and Merton in 1937, entitled 'Social Time: A Methodological and Functional Analysis' that some of the Durkheimian ideas were taken up again. This paper identified social time as qualitatively heterogeneous (e.g. holidays and market days), not quantitatively homogeneous as astronomical or physical time has it. Social time was seen as being divided into intervals that derive from collective social activities rather than being uniformly flowing. Local time systems, it was argued, function mainly in order to assure the coordination and synchronization of local activities which eventually become extended and integrated, thereby necessitating common time systems. The Durkheimian claim of the category of time being rooted in social activities, of time being socially constituted by virtue of the 'rhythm of social life' itself, buttressed by the analysis of the social functions it served, was a tacit rebuttal of Kant's a priori intuitions of time, space and causality.

The claim to the existence of a concept of 'social time', distinct from other forms of time, was thus made early in the history of social thought. It continues to focus upon the claims of the peculiar nature of the 'social constitution' or the 'social construction' of time. These claims evidently put the category of 'social time' into the wider realm of 'symbolic time', a cultural phenomenon, the constitution of which has remained the object of inquiry of more disciplines than sociology alone, but which separates it from time in nature, embedded in things and artifacts.

In the then undeveloped sociology of knowledge, Durkheim held as the most general conclusion that it is the rhythm of social life which is the basis of the category of time itself (Durkheim, 1912:7). These obser-vations opened up important questions about the social origins and func-tions of the category of time and how social time can be distinguished and is distinct from astronomical time.

Using Twitter to detect rumoring activity allows us to measure rumoring at large spatial and temporal scales, but it placeslimits on the generalizability of our results. Activity on Twitter does not represent all rumoring activity or all online, informalcommunication. Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project provides an in-depth examination of how Twitter’sdemographics compare to those of the United States (Duggan and Brenner, 2013). Twitter demographics skew (indepen-dently) young, urban, and minority, while there is no significant difference in participation across gender, educationalattainment, and income. These results may overrepresent rumoring activity from minority, urban, or young populations. It isnot immediately clear, however, how this would bias the results, as the existing literature does not clearly demonstrate thatthese particular groups engage in rumoring activity that differs in volume, content, or form from other populations. None-theless, it is worthwhile to recognize the biased population from which these data are drawn, as a number of electronicallymediated communication media will have similar biases that must be recognized when applyingfiltering techniques.

Through spatio-temporalfiltering of messages we are able to observeevolution of topic signal that is consistent with rumor theory’s predictions. In the area immediately surrounding Moore wefind the strongest evidence that rumoring is an evolutionary process, as the topic and tone of messages shifts notably over thisthree-day span. Although these results may not necessarily generalize to all events, we dofind some initial support thatrumoring is a process marked by topical evolution over time. Once again, the spatio-temporalfiltering approach proves to berobust tool for measuring signal of hazard-related rumoring.

Ahead of major storms such as the Moore tornado Twitterusers frequently retransmit alerts and warnings, or parts thereof, and this bin reflects a surge of this typical retransmissionactivity on the day prior to the Moore tornado

While the counts of messages in the 100e200 and 700e800 mile bins are nearly identical, the latter binincludes the Atlanta metro area and much of the Chicago metro area, two of the top-ten largest metro areas in the country. Asillustrated inTable 1, the counts of messages vary by location based on the populations in those locations. Accordingly, rawcounts of“tornado”messages will be influenced by the population in each bin. In many contexts one would want to accountfor spatial heterogeneity in population by establishing a baseline measure of activity in each bin

Using what is known about social responses to disaster events(impending or realized), we selectivelyfilter timestamped streams of geolocated, informal communication activity by timeand location in order to identify surges of rumoring activity in response to a disaster. Spatio-temporalfiltering enhances ourability to detect events by utilizing the signal produced by sources that are known (or expected) to produce reliable infor-mation, thereby enhancing our ability to detect distinct activity patterns above and beyond typical global signal (i.e. back-ground noise representing the array of signals irrelevant to our focus)

Likewise, such strategies also inform our approach tofiltering across time. In this case weobserve message volumes in 24-h intervals, which illustrates daily changes in activity. For cases with especially rich data (orrapidly changing signals),filtering data at an hourly resolution may be more appropriate, whilefiltering at a weekly ormonthly resolution would be more appropriate for very sparse or slowly changing activity signals.

Similarly, theories of informant accuracy posit that those with accurate domainknowledge provide more reliable responses with less error than those without such knowledge (Romney et al.,1986; Romneyand Weller,1984; Sudman et al.,1996; Weller and Romney,1988). Their observations will cluster around a single“truth”whileinaccurate observations (i.e. error) will be randomly scattered around the truth; that is, error is inhomogeneous and does nottypically converge around a small number of data points.

Tobler’s First Law of Geography states that“Allthings are related, but nearby things are more related than distant things”(Tobler, 1970). Barring sudden, drastic changes tothe landscape, new information from a specific locale should be consistent with what we already know about that location aswell as what we know about nearby locations

Such news frequently is more timely than news from official sources andtherefore becomes the dominant mode of information transmission (Caplow, 1947; Kreps, 1984).

Although the spatio-temporal variation in rumor quantity and content has long been of interest to thefield, collecting data that accounts for temporalandspatial characteristics of rumoring has been extraordinarily difficult to dowith any degree of precision. Some have been able to capture rumoring data with some degree of temporal precision (Bordiaand Rosnow, 1998; Danzig, 1958; Greenberg, 1964) or with some spatial precision (Larsen, 1954), but bridging the two hasbeen difficult. Synthesizing temporal and spatial rumoring data across a wide variety of events had long been beyond thecapabilities of researchers. Simply gathering reliable data on rumoring was already fraught with challenges.

Some have described rumoring as a task of collective problem solving (Bordia and DiFonzo, 2004; Shibutani,1966) withreasonably well defined start and end points. A process helping individuals make sense of their environments and cope withuncertainty, rumoring tends to dissipate once cognitive unclarity has been eliminated (Caplow, 1947).

Informal communication in this context falls under formal definitions ofrumoring: informal,person-to-person communication pertaining to current, newsworthy topics of interest among a population (Allport andPostman, 1947; Bordia and DiFonzo, 2004; Caplow, 1947; Rosnow and Kimmel, 2000; Shibutani, 1966). A key componentof this definition of rumor is that such statements are not confirmed by official sources. Although rumoring has historicallybeen a notoriously difficult phenomenon to measure, thefield has a developed basic understanding of the general principlesof rumoring behaviors in disaster contexts. These common behavioral patterns allow us to refine our approach for measuringsignal of disaster-related rumoring activity.

Our results demonstrate the promise of spatio-temporalfiltering techniques for“tuning”measurement of hazard-related rumoring to enableobservation of rumoring at scales that have long been infeasible.

While theapplication in the online environment is novel, the general problem is not. Interest in automated signal processing in noisyenvironments (Fawcett and Provost,1999; Hamid et al., 2005; Macleod and Congalton,1998; Ribeiro et al., 2012; Singh,1989;Stauffer and Grimson, 2000) predates the proliferation of user-generated online activity, and we can apply the lessons learnedin those contexts to the online context.

Rumoring about disaster events is typically temporally and spatiallyconstrained to places where that event is salient. Accordingly, we use spatio and temporalsubsampling to increase the resolution of our detection techniques. Byfiltering out datafrom known sources of error (per rumor theories), we greatly enhance the signal ofdisaster-related rumoring activity. We use these spatio-temporalfiltering techniques todetect rumoring during a variety of disaster events, from high-casualty events in majorpopulation centers to minimally destructive events in remote areas.

Measuring features of informal communicationetiming, content, locationewith any degree of precision has historically been extremelychallenging in small studies and infeasible at large scales

It reveals that technology and artefacts not only shape our lives but our knowledge; that the dead things which are so conscientiously excluded from social analyses are not only implicated in our daily existence but constitute our social theories. They therefore need to be moved to the centre stage of social theory. We need to allow the implications of contemporary living to penetrate the depth of our understanding, to connect the complexity of our being to the meanings we impose on it, and to recognise our existing social theories as relics of a bygone age.

I am proposing that we need to take on board the time-scales of our technologies if our theories are to become adequate to their subject matter: contemporary industrialised, science-based technological society. Giddens's concept of time-space distanciation might prove useful here despite its association with the storage capacity of information Time for Social Theory: Points of Departure 167 which makes the present application of the concept primarily past, rather than past and future orientated. There seems to be no reason why the concept of time-space distanciation, with its link to power, could not be exploited to theorise influences on the long-term future. Such an extension would allow us to understand the present as present past and present future, where each change affects the whole.

Contemporary thinkers from a wide range of fields arrived at an understanding that recognises the implication of our past in the present; in other words, that our personal and social history forms an ineradicable part of us. I can find no good reason why we should exlude our biological and cosmic past from the acceptance of this general principle.

Bearing in mind the conceptual difficulties and limitations of the level approach, we can see that an understanding through levels achieves a number of things. It emphasises the complexity of time and imposes order on the multiple expressions. It prevents us from focusing on one or two aspects of time at the expense of others. In addition to the more obviously social components, it establishes the centrality of the physical, living, technological, and artefactual aspects of social time. It stresses and affirms connections and relationships. It brings to the surface both the continuities and the irreducible aspects of social time. It helps us to avoid confusing the time aspects of our social life with those of nature

To Mead the past is irrevocable to the extent that events cannot be undone, thoughts not unthought, and knowledge not unknown. In this irrever-sible form, he contends, the past is unknowable since the intervening knowledge continuously changes the meaning of that past and relentlessly recreates and reformulates it into a new and different past. He argues this on the basis of the proposition that only emergence in the present has reality status. He does not accord the past and future such a status because they are real only with respect to their relation to the present. In Mead's thought the past changes with respect to our experiencing it in the present and the meaning we give to it. In contradistinction to the past, he conceptualises the reality of the present as changing with each emergence.

Not the number of levels or their content are at issue here since these might be varied according to the degree of the analysis' generality but their static developmental stages where the level 'below' is denied aspects that characterise the level 'above'. In other words, whilst theories of time levels are theoretically of interest and echoed in many subsequent social science conceptualisations -including those of Sorokin ( 1964) and Elias (1982a, b, 1984), for example -they deny to non-human nature what we have found to be central: the importance of past, present, and future extension; of history, creativity, temporality, time experience, and time norms. If time differ-ences are conceptualised with reference to stable, integrative levels then this prevents any understanding in terms of resonance and feedback loops. With discrete, unidirectional levels, consciousness cannot be shown to resonate throughout all of nature; and what we think of as 'human time' stays falsely imprisoned at that level.

Despite these important advantages, however, there are difficulties associated with the conceptualisation of social time in terms of levels. These relate to our tendency to reify the levels, to conceptualise them hierarchically, and to postulate clear cut-off points between them. The three, as we shall see, are closely interconnected.

A conceptualisation in terms of levels seems therefore well suited to explain and theorise the multitude of times entailed in contemporary life. To think of these times as expressions of different levels of our being avoids the need to discuss one aspect at the expense of all others. It means that we do not need to chose on an either/ or basis. It encourages us to see connections and not to lose sight of the multiplicity while we concentrate on any one of those multiple expressions.

The exclusion of non-symbolic expressions from social science analysis has not only resulted in a highly problematic conceptualisation of nature and natural time but it has also meant the omission of artefacts and technology from social science. As Carlstein ( I 982: 8-9) points out, 'social scientists have commonly refused to see 'dead things' as social or have left them aside for the natural scientists. Social scientists have also commonly Time for Social Theory: Points of Departure 157 refused to look upon artefacts as social in the sense that they impinge on how individuals interact with each other. These 'dead things' are, at best, seen as symbols and are not considered to be genuine ingredients in social situations and processes.' Yet, with respect to time, it is difficult to see how we can understand society without the time aspects of those 'dead things', those created artefacts and machines that shape our lives and our understanding of reality.

Recognising ourselves as having evolved, and thus being the times of nature, allows for the humanly constituted aspects of time to become one expression among the others. Biologists have dispelled the idea that only humans experience time or organise their lives by it. Waiting and timing in nature presuppose knowledge of time and temporality, irrespective of their being symbolised, conceptualised, reckoned, or measured. Yet, once time is constituted symbolically, it is no longer reducible to the communication of organisms or physical signals; it is no longer a mere sensory datum. For a person to have a past and to recognise and know it entails a representational, symbolically based imagination. Endowed with it, people do not merely undergo their presents and pasts but they shape and reshape them. Symbolic meaning thus makes the past infinitely flexible. With objectified meaning we can not only look back, reflect, and contemplate but we can reinterpret, restructure, alter, and modify the past irrespective of whether this is done in the light of new knowledge in the present, to suit the present, or for purposes of legitimation.

More importantly non-symbolic expressions of reality are traditionally understood to be outside the disciplinary boundaries of the human social sciences. These reasons may explain the convention but they cannot justify it. We can accept that for us to be able to talk and think about time necessitates our putting it into words. If this is all that is being expressed, it is not very much; if it equates reality with the symbol, it goes too far. There is no need to deny that all humans formulate meanings symbolically or that this is a fundamentally social process. There is an urgent need, however, to appreciate that time is an aspect of nature, and that nature encompasses the symbolic universe of human society. Once we recognise ourselves as bearers of all the multiple times of nature, and once we allow for nature to include symbolic expression, the gulf between the symbolic knower and nature as an external (unknowable) object can be dispensed with. The mutually exclusive dichotomies of nature and culture, subject and object become irrelevant.

The idea that time is not separable from the meaning of time, that it always symbolises something that is socially formulated, is a more complex one to untangle.

In other words, the idea of time as socially constituted depends fundamentally on the meaning we impose on 'the social', whether we understand it as a prerogative of human social organisation or, following Mead, as a principle of nature.

A brief expansion of these general social science assumptions about nature will clarify this point. Nature as distinct from social life is understood to be quantifiable, simple, and subject to invariant relations and laws that hold beyond time and space (Giddens 1976; Lessnoff 1979· ~yan 1979). This view is accompanied by an understanding of natural time as coming in fixed, divisible units that can be measured whilst quality, complexit~, ~nd mediating knowledge are preserved exclusively for the conceptuahsat10n of human social time. On the basis of a further closely related idea it is proposed that nature may be understood objectively. Natural scientists, explain Elias (1982a, b) and Giddens ( 1976), stand in a subject-object relationship to their subject matter. Natural scientists, they suggest, are able to study objects directly and apply a causal framework of analysis whilst such direct causal links no longer suffice for the study of human society where that which is investigated has to be appreciated as unintended outcomes of intended actions and where the investigators interpret a pre-interpreted world. Unlike their colleagues in the natural sciences, social scientists, it is argued, stand in a subject-subject relation to their subject matter. In a?ditio? to the differences along the quantity-quality and object-subject d1mens10ns nature is thought to be predictable because its regularities -be they causal, statistical, or probabilistic -are timeless. The laws of nature. are c?nsi~ered to be true in an absolute and timeless way, the laws of society h1stoncally developed. In contrast to nature, human societies are argued to be fundamentally historical. They are organised around :alues, goals, morals, ethics, and hopes, whilst simultaneously being mfl~enc~d by tradition, habits, and legitimised meanings.

Since our traditional understanding of natural time e~erged as inadequate and faulty we have to recognise that the analysis of social time is flawed by implication.

Past, present, and future, historical time, the qualitative experience of time, the structuring of 'undifferentiated change' i?to episodes, all are established as integral time aspects of the subJect matter of the natural sciences and clock time, the invariant measure, the closed circle, the perfect symmetry, and reversible time as our creations.

Sorokin and Merton (1937) may be said to have provided the 'definitive' classic statement on the distinction between social and natural time. They associate the physical time of diurnal and seasonal cycles with clock time and define this time as 'purely quantitative, shorn of qualitative variation' (p. 621). 'All time systems', Sorokin and Merton suggest further, 'may be reduced to the need of providing means for synchronising and co-ordinating the activities and observations of the constituents of groups' (p. 627).