Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
always and everywhere times, i.e., always coming into being, and geography
can never be fruitfully portrayed as a static landscape frozen at one temporal
moment. This line of work,
firmly embedded in Cartesian notions of time and
space, revealed cultural and regional di
fi
erences in how people use time and
space, but shed little light on how they perceived or gave meaning to them or
how their resources and constraints were socially generated. Time-geography
thus su
ff
ers from an inadequate notion of human consciousness and an
impoverished sense of class, gender, power and politics, a void partially
ff
lled
somewhat later by the marriage of time-geography and structuration theory
(Pred 1984a, 1984b). Time geography did, however, attempt (if unsuccessfully)
to force the sterile discipline of regional science to humanize its concerns (cf.
Hagerstrand 1970), and greatly in
fi
fl
uenced subsequent social theories by keep-
ing a
firm focus on the spatio-temporal constitution of social systems. Under
the impacts of Geographic Information Systems, it has allowed increasingly
nuanced understandings of how di
fi
eren-
tial patterns of social mobility (e.g., Kwan 1999) and negotiate time-space
compression at the spatio-temporal scales of the household and daily life.
Central to structuration theory is time-space distanciation, the “stretching
of social systems across time-space on the basis of mechanisms of social and
system integration” (Giddens 1984:377). The basis of this process, Giddens
argues, is “disembedding mechanisms” such as symbolic systems and trans-
portation technologies that lift social interactions from their local contexts
and relocate them across vast time-space distances. Until recently (i.e., until
the invention of telecommunications in the nineteenth century), the degree
to which people monitored each other's actions (or what Giddens calls
presence-availability) relied heavily upon face-to-face interaction, which is
still fundamentally important despite numerous other possible channels of
communication. Over time, particularly given the profound reductions in
transport and communications times and costs under capitalism, vast parts of
the world have experienced a pronounced time-space convergence, with dra-
matic e
ff
erent social groups experience di
ff
ects for human interaction, conceptions of the self, and social change.
Structuration theory depicts world historical change as one of increasing
cohesion, although time and space never cease to be problematic. In particu-
lar, the rise of modernity allowed co-presencing among individuals to occur
at ever-greater distances, particularly through the use of telecommunications
(Warf 1994). Thus, Giddens's theory operates at two analytical levels simul-
taneously, one concerned with the abstract dynamics of social reproduction
and the other with the concrete manifestation of social power in a variety
of historical circumstances ranging from the Neolithic to the rise of the
nation-state to postmodern globalization (Giddens 1984, 1987, 1990, 2000).
As social relations become progressive distanciated, their ability to be con-
trolled by the people who make them declines accordingly. Giddens writes
(1984:171) that “the greater the time-space distanciation of social systems—
the more their institutions bite into time and space—the more resistant they
are to manipulation or change by any individual agent.” If the early literature
ff
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