Geography Reference
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are fundamental to any serious understanding of the human subject. Moving
beyond the usual elementary de
nitions of culture as the sum total of learned
behavior or a “way of life” (e.g., religion, language, mores, traditions, roles,
etc.), structuration theory portrays culture as what people take for granted in
order to function as social agents, i.e., common sense, the matrix of ideologies
that allow them to negotiate their way through their everyday worlds. In the
form of what Giddens calls practical consciousness, these stocks of know-
ledge are so deeply internalized that they may not even be evident to the
people who hold them. Culture de
fi
nes what is normal and what is not, what
is important and what is not, what is acceptable and what is not, within each
social context (i.e., within particular time-spaces). Culture is acquired through
a lifelong process of socialization, i.e., individuals are socially produced from
cradle to grave. The socialization of the individual and the reproduction of
society are two sides of the same coin, i.e., the macrostructures of social
relations are interlaced with the microstructures of everyday life (Thrift 1983;
Pred 1984, 1990).
In this view, the structural properties of social formations are synonymous
with how everyday social conduct is reproduced across time and space. Social
structures consist of the properties that bind societies together in time-space,
and only exist in their implementation or instanciation, a move that trans-
forms the once-strict dualism of structure and agency into a
fi
fluid duality in
which each exists only by virtue of the other. Social structures are instanci-
ated in the co-presence of people in everyday life, i.e., the degree to which the
rhythms of social reproduction bring them into contact with one another to
engage in co-presencing. People reproduce the world, for the most part
unintentionally, in their everyday lives, and in turn, the world reproduces them
through socialization. In forming their biographies every day, individuals
reproduce and transform their social worlds primarily without meaning to do
so. Everyday thought and behavior, the unacknowledged preconditions to
action, do not simply mirror the world, they constitute it as the outcomes to
action. Social structures and relations are thus reproduced, and hence simul-
taneously changed, by the people who make them; individuals are both
produced by, and producers of, history and geography.
Giddens's theorization of how social relations are structured and change
across time and space also invokes time-geography (Hagerstrand 1970; Pred
1978, 1981a, 1984a), which, in emphasizing the inseparable unity of time and
space, portrayed society as consisting of a “weaving dance” of individuals
through time and space in their everyday lives. Time-geography sought to
uncover the dynamics of spatio-temporal behavior using time-budget studies
as individuals allocated their daily allotment of travel times subject to various
capability, coupling, and authority constraints (Carlstein et al. 1978a, 1978b,
1978c; Pred 1977a, 1978, 1981a, 1981b). The space-time prisms that resulted
from time-geography were held to re
fl
ect,
inter alia
, how individuals matched
the supply and demand for their time, “packing” their activities within a
limited temporal duration and geographic domain. Places, in this view, are
fl
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