![]() In any given culture, there are clock-time and event-time people living in it - sometimes synchronously and sometimes not, says Anne-Laure Sellier, a business professor at HEC Paris who studies the time mindsets of individuals. Still, even by Spanish standards, she admits, she often runs "late." "For dinner, for sure, if someone invites you to dinner at 8 p.m., you can show up at 10 p.m. People go home for lunch they take afternoon siestas. to Valencia, Spain, which is generally considered a more laid-back, event-time-oriented society. ![]() My friend Danielle Hardoon, an American Montessori teacher and consultant, has been notoriously late since childhood, at least according to the clock. "The way that we measure time is really constructed." There are variations within cultures too "I think that's what we have to put in our head," McClaurin says. Goats and Soda Under 'Kenyan Time,' You're Expected To Arrive. But being less rigid with time, anthropologists, historians and other researchers tell me, continues to have its place and advantages too. Today, the focus on "synchronizing watches" is still valuable in cities and urban workplaces where a large group of people need to synchronize their activities to achieve a goal. That's when the increasing demands of factory work and the growth of railroads combined with the new boom in factory-made clocks and watches to create a new, more rigid expectation of punctuality. Strictly timing our day by the clock - the whole notion of being on time - took off with the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, McClaurin explains. "Clock time" versus "event time" - how did we get here? ![]() Equating punctuality with high value is a shortsighted view of history and a narrow view of world cultures, she and other scholars say. "We've created this schema that somehow 'being on time' is evidence of how much you value something," says Irma McClaurin, an anthropologist, independent scholar and founder of the Black Feminist Archive, which is based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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