Time Orientation

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 534.

The final aspect of cultural patterns concerns how people conceptualize time. Time orientation provides answers to questions such as the following:

· How should time be valued and understood?

· Is time a scarce resource, or is it unlimited?

· Is the desirable pace of life fast or slow?

· Is time linear or cyclical?

Some cultures choose to describe the future as most important, others emphasize the present, and still others emphasize the past. In Japanese and Chinese cultures, the anniversary of the death of a loved one is celebrated, illustrating the value these cultures place on the past. In contrast, Native Americans and Latinos are present-oriented. European Americans, of course, are future-oriented.

Most European Americans view time as a scarce (дефицит) and valuable commodity (товар) akin (схожий) to money or other economic investments. They strive to "save time," "make lime," "spend time” and "gain time." Events during a day are dictated by a schedule of activities, precisely defined and differentiated.

Most cultures in Latin America bring an entirely different orientation to time, responding to individuals and circumstances rather than following a scheduled plan for the day. Similarly, Romanians also do not define punctuality as precisely as European Americans do. Thus, time is viewed within these cultural frames as endless and ongoing. A culture's time orientation also suggests the pace of life. The fast, hectic pace of European Americans, governed by clocks, appointments, and schedules, has become so commonly accepted that it is almost a cliché.

The pace of life in cultures such as India, Kenya, and Argentina and among African Americans is less hectic, more relaxed, and more comfortably paced. In African American culture, for example, orientations to time are driven less by a need to "get things done" and conform to external demands than by a sense of participation in events that create their own rhythm.

As Jack Daniel and Geneva Smitherman suggest about time in African American culture,

Being on time has to do with participating in the fulfillment of an activity that is vital to the sustenance (существование) of a basic rhythm, rather than with appearing on the scene at, say, "twelve o'clock sharp." The key is not to be Hon time" but "in time” [21].

(Nonverbal communication codes are also under the influence of a culture's orientation toward time on aspects of communication).

A culture's underlying patterns consist of orientations to activity, social relations, the self, the world, and time. The interdependence among these aspects of culture is obvious from the preceding discussion. Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck provide a way to understand, rather than to judge, different cultural predispositions, and it demonstrates that there are different ways of defining the "real," "good," and "correct" ways to behave.