Agrarian societies were the dominant form of organising mankind before the onset of industrialisation. In such pre-industrial societies, people had a disregard for clock time – an artificial construct – and regarded time as synonymous with nature.
People planted, harvested, and went about their days according to natural temporal cycles like the seasons, days, or tides. In fact, clock time in some societies was actually based on natural cycles. In pre-industrial Japan, for instance, life was governed by seasonal time, with days that varied with the season and indicated on seasonal-time clocks known as wadokei.
This notion of time was put forward by British historian E.P. Thompson in his seminal 1967 paper, Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism. Thompson labelled it “task-orientation”, where time was based on natural cycles, so a workday would be between sunrise and sunset, rather than between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm.
And work was based on completing the task at hand. As a result, there was little distinction between work and leisure, as social interactions often intermingled with work, while the length of the workday varied depending on the tasks of the day.
But the Industrial Revolution transformed the perception of time from task- to time-oriented. Now time was “not passed but spent” wrote Thompson, becoming a measurable resource that the employers could harness and expend to maximise output.
As a result, once abstract units of clock time, such as the hours and minutes, became embedded amongst the minds of factory workers who were selling their labour, measured in units of hours, every long working day. And employers unsurprisingly enforced time discipline, while punctuality became a virtue.
The transformation in time perception influenced not only industry, but also biological functions. In stark contrast to task-oriented societies, people in time-oriented society ate and slept not because of hunger or tiredness, but because the clock dictated it was mealtime or bedtime.
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