Photo credit: Mushrooms surrounded by trees by Valentin S.
This is the sixth and final essay in a series of essays I’ve written on time. You can view a list of all of them on the first essay.
Eviatar Zerubavel is a sociologist of time who has studied how time works in organizations and amongst groups of people; essentially collective temporal norms. He began by studying the rhythms and temporal structures within a hospital and later went on to study calendaring, scheduling, and other temporal ordering within groups. His goal was to illuminate “the sociotemporal order, which regulates the lives of of social entities such as families, professional groups, religious communities, complex organizations, and even entire nations… The sociotemporal order is essentially a socially constructed artifact which rests on rather arbitrary social conventions” (Zerubavel 1985, xii).
Arbitrary seems like the important keyword there. The way we schedule and the way we enforce time norms in our organizations is not neutral. It reflects the values of the organization. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of moving to a new job and getting used to new rhythms and norms. I’ve worked in four different libraries and at each one, scheduling has been done radically differently. Those rhythms are neither random nor inevitable. The people there might not have consciously chosen them, but they grew out of the organizational culture and reflect its values. This means that they can also change if we stop taking them for granted or decide to value other things – like the well-being of workers.
I’ve written in the past that individualism is the enemy of slow librarianship. We are so trained to value self-sufficiency, to try to shine brighter than others, to believe that if we work hard enough, we can achieve anything. Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel (2020) writes that “the more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility. And without these sentiments, it is hard to care for the common good” (14). And I think individualism really keeps us at this frenetic pace because we fear that if we slow down, we will be giving up potential raises, accolades, job security, and more. We compare ourselves to others and fear how it would look if we worked at a more humane pace. And we know that for people in precarious positions, that fear is quite real. As Mountz et al. (2015) write in their article on slow scholarship, “our goal is to move from individualized experiences of neoliberal time to collective action, precisely to resist intensified pressures to do it all and/or intensify elitist structures that make ‘slowness’ possible for some while leaving others slogging in the trenches” (1248).
A key shift needs to happen where we see ourselves in solidarity with one another and where we recognize that we can gain much more working together than we possibly could from jealously guarding the minimal privilege we have as individuals. A feminist ethic of care is at the heart of all slow movements. According to Mountz, et al. “slow scholarship enables a feminist ethics of care that allows us to claim some time as our own, build shared time into everyday life, and help buffer each other from unrealistic and counterproductive norms that have become standard expectations” (1253-4). Similarly, Brons et al. (2022) write, about supporting library workers in precarity, that “care ethics centers relational and interdependent human experiences, explicitly naming the value of emotional labor, community building, and nurturing… Centering an inclusive ethics of care could begin to address some of the inequity and negative effects that emerge from prolonged devaluation of care” (18-19). I agree that care ethics goes beyond solidarity and into recognition of our essential interdependence. There is something beautiful in acknowledging that we are part of a web or a tapestry of interdependence. According to Nancy Fraser “these networks of interdependencies can actually make people feel very much more connected, like their fates are tied together” (Chang 2020).
Just as slowing down requires solidarity, building capacity for solidarity requires slowing down. As Parkins and Craig (2006) write in their excellent book Slow Living, “the daily practices which allow us to cultivate an attitude of wonder and generosity… require time, for reflection and attention, which reminds us of our connections to nature and others (50). Moya Bailey (2021) considers what an “ethics of pace” might looks like and suggests that it is a deeply relational and collaborative practice:
The ethic of pace I want moving forward in my life and in my academic work is a slow and sustainable pace, one that moves at the speed of trust [emphasis mine] and is not driven by capitalistic imperatives… We must pivot and change how we relate to each other. We must slow down to survive. (296)
I love this deeply relational vision for a slower pace in the workplace. We have to do this work together.
Ellen Samuels and the late Elizabeth Freeman (2021) wrote during the heart of the pandemic about changes in the workplace necessitated by COVID: “at the same time that disabled people see nondisabled people now contending with a cripped workplace, we also see approaches to work and study long denied to us as ‘unreasonable’ accommodations—too expensive, too burdensome, not the way it’s done—suddenly implemented quickly, universally, and with total social acceptance” (247). How ironic that we can’t let an individual work from home a few days per week due to a disability until every able-bodied person is able to do the same. While the experience of COVID should have shown us that there is much greater flexibility within the system than is often acknowledged, people with disabilities still are often treated like the minor accommodations they are requesting are maximally disruptive (I’ve experienced this personally). And I believe that reflects the values of the institution. If it does not value worker well-being very highly, it will offer less flexibility.
Crip time can act as a roadmap toward a humane pace for all, not just those currently living with disabilities. As Moya Bailey writes, “humans are feeling an exponential pressure to move faster and produce more efficiently, all in service to an imperative to survive that has been warped by capitalistic greed. This pressure exacerbates disability, creates impairments, and even leads to premature death.” If this unrelenting pace can be disabling, can permanently damage people, perhaps we all need to push for a pace that allows us to breathe, to rest, to reflect, and to stay healthy. There is nothing inevitable about the pace in which we currently work, about checking email or Slack or Teams 20 times each day, about checking in on work long after the workday is done. We have the power to change these norms. Cripping time should be a societal change, not one each individual person with disabilities (or person trying to avoid being disabled) must fight for. We should collectively refuse to work at an unsustainable pace.
What would a collective care-centered library organizational culture look like? It would clearly include a lot more grace and flexibility than is extended in most of our institutions. I really appreciate Leah Piepzna-Samarsinha’s vision:
Collective care means shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, move slower, ones where there’s food at meetings, people work from home—and these aren’t things we apologize for.
I think all this requires us to create a vision for community time that exists outside of capitalist notions of tit-for-tat and exact reciprocity. My vision for community time is one where we see all the work of libraries as a shared project and contribute as our capacity allows. And on the other side, we provide mutual support as our capacity allows, without looking to be paid back or for labor to be exchanged on a 1:1 basis. I agree with Piepzna-Samarasinha that seeing our work as a collective responsibility and providing collective care can be a beautiful and joyful experience. Imagine the peace of mind of always knowing you have the support you needed when you simply couldn’t get things done (because of illness, disability, caregiving responsibilities, etc.). Imagine the freedom of feeling like you can fall down and rest and won’t let the world down or jeopardize your job. Imagine the joy of providing support to your colleagues when they really need it. Imagine the deep relationships and trust that come from a communal vision of time. Think of how vulnerable and human you could be in such an environment. And perhaps there is a new kind of freedom in such an arrangement as Ivan Illich suggested: “I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value.”
My current job is the first one in which I felt like I could have bodily needs and schedule my work time around them to at least a small extent. It’s the first where people didn’t all come to work at the exact same time and that was seen as an asset. Some of us come in early to cover the early reference shifts (like me, since I have to be done before my son finishes school) and others came in later and stayed later because they weren’t early risers or wanted to miss rush hour traffic. I was able to schedule my reference shifts around my hypoglycemia (no more dizzy at the desk or grotesquely shoving a protein bar in my mouth while working with a student). Another colleague was able to skip having an evening reference shift (we each had one) for six months when they had a health condition that made it difficult. When my colleague’s spouse was in the hospital, another colleague and I took on their reference shifts and classes. I’ve taught classes with less than 20 minutes’ notice because a colleague called in sick. We all just made these things work. It took me a while to get used to it after working at places where everything was seen as your individual responsibility, not a shared one. I remember once at another job I started vomiting at work and no one would take the class I was supposed to teach even though most of them technically could have (only one had a meeting). I was running from office to office begging people when I should have been on my way home. That probably wouldn’t happen here.
What I think I appreciate most is that no one seems to be keeping score with these things (it took me a while to get past doing that myself) and there isn’t a focus on tit-for-tat transactional exchanges or who is asking for how much. In previous jobs, the assumption was that if you needed someone to cover a reference shift, you needed to take one of theirs. There had to be as close to a 1:1 exchange as possible. If you’re asking for coverage because you’re feeling totally underwater and have a gazillion classes to teach, you’re then just kicking the can a day or two down the road. In my current job, people ask all the time for someone to take a few hours of their reference shift and only rarely is a swap of hours involved. More often than not, we just cover each other’s shifts without expecting to be “paid back,” but expecting that when we need the same support, we’ll get it (maybe not from that exact person, but from someone else in the community). And here, it’s actually a safe assumption. People simply cover as their schedules allow as we all have somewhat different ebbs and flows to our schedules. Because of that culture, I see more requests for reference coverage come across my email than at any other place I’ve worked because people don’t feel like it has to be an absolute emergency to request coverage. It can feel a bit chaotic, but somehow everything does get covered. And that culture wasn’t dictated by a boss or even discussed and decided upon. It just grew organically by virtue of our shared commitment to the work, genuine care and respect for one another, spirit of solidarity, and trust in each other (I think it also helps that scheduling in the first place is in our hands and not that of a boss). It’s not my perfect vision for an interdependent community time, but it’s the closest I’ve experienced.
I don’t think a culture like that could grow at an institution where people feel precarious in their jobs or see their colleagues as competition for scarce resources (promotions, raises, praise, etc.). When the culture is individualistic or people are in a space of comparing or are looking for exact equality in workload (pretty much an impossibility but that doesn’t stop people from endlessly comparing), regardless of capacity at that particular time, there will be more of a focus on an exact exchange of hours, treating them as a commodity. I also think this only works if people aren’t overworked and overscheduled, because that erodes our capacity for community care. There has to be at least a little slack in the system (something my colleagues and I will have less of this academic year which makes me worry). But because of that slack, everything doesn’t fall apart when people have a health or family emergency. While some of us may be overloaded at a particular time, we’re not all drowning in work in week 3 of the term. And it’s because of that, we don’t treat our time as a scarce commodity and instead give generously when/if we can. And, like Ivan Illich suggested, wow do I feel freer than when I was in more individualistic and transactional cultures in other libraries.
The other thing lacking in our field is any sense of enoughness. In a profession where we could always be doing more to serve our patrons, not having any sense of what enough looks like is a recipe for always feeling like we should be doing more. I love Edlinger, Ungericht, and Deimling’s (2021) article on enoughness. They clearly see the problem in our organizations (and society):
People are constantly both exposed to and subjected to logics of quantification and measurement. Rather than having enough and being enough, the dominant paradigm of growth and a culture of individualization rely on striving for more and being better, as well as idealizing maximization and perfection. (159)
Again, we see individualism playing a toxic role in holding us back from imagining something better. Edlinger, Ungericht, and Deimling suggest that “enoughness denotes a state or condition of having and being enough, thereby negating the need for an external reference point and avoiding comparability” (161). Imagine feeling like you were doing enough, like the organization was doing enough. Imagine being able to focus on doing better instead of doing more. We have the ability to do less. To define what enough looks like. To live in a sense of abundance. By worrying that there isn’t enough time, that we’re not doing enough, time becomes scarce, increasing our anxiety and the pace of our worklives. “The reduction of want, slowing down and producing and consuming less are the likely effects of enoughness, which shifts our focus from scarcity and wanting to abundance and being.” (Edlinger, Ungericht, and Deimling 2021, 169-170). I love what Jenny Odell (2023) says about this at the end of Saving Time: “If time were not a commodity, then time, our time, would not be as scarce as it seemed just a moment ago. Together, we could have all the time in the world” (225). Exactly.
I just read Ruha Benjamin’s (2024) terrific new book Imagination: A Manifesto (which I think is a fantastic companion to Adrienne Maree Brown’s work, like Emergent Strategy). In it, she asks us to critically think about whose imagination we are currently living in (the roots of our reality and who this reality serves), how social forces work to constrain our imagination (especially that of people society deems as less-than), who gets to imagine the future, and the power we have to imagine radically better futures. Like my vision of time, her vision of imagination is collective: “the most effective means to refute the prevailing ideologies is to do so collectively – crafting new stories, images, ways of interacting, and investments in those who have been denigrated and discarded” (10). Imagining a better world together is the only way we are going to build a better world. And we can’t allow ourselves to be constrained by forces that seek to limit our imagination to our current systems and ways of seeing. Benjamin quotes Angela Davis who writes “dangerous limits have been placed on the very possibility of imagining alternatives… These ideological limits have to be contested. We have to begin to think in different ways. Our future is at stake” (8). I recommend Benjamin’s book as much as I recommend freeing your imagination from what shackles it.
We are currently trapped in someone else’s imagined world of work and vision of time that doesn’t serve the vast majority of us. Please remember that it can be otherwise, but we have to decide to work together. To see ourselves in solidarity with our colleagues. To see interdependence as aspirational and community care as the best way forward. To see ourselves as part of a mutual web of need, care, vulnerability, and trust that doesn’t require everyone to do exactly the same amount of work every week and allows people to fall down sometimes. Let’s put on our thinking caps and imagine this new world of work and this new relationship with time together. As Angela Davis said, “our future is at stake.”
This is my last essay on the topic of time, at least for now. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the issues I’ve raised here and in the other essays in this series. P.S. If you’re wondering why all the pictures of mushrooms?, I was thinking about the mycelial network that connects mushrooms together and sustains them and how I wish we could see the invisible threads that connect and sustain us all.
Bailey, Moya. “The ethics of pace.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (2021): 285-299.
Benjamin, Ruha. 2024. Imagination : A Manifesto. First edition. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.
Brons, Adena, Chloe Riley, Ean Henninger, and Crystal Yin. “Precarity Doesn’t Care: Precarious Employment as a Dysfunctional Practice in Libraries.” In Libraries as Dysfunctional Organizations and Workplaces, pp. 95-108. Routledge, 2022.
brown, adrienne maree. 2017. Emergent Strategy : Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Chang, Clio. “Taking Care of Each Other Is Essential Work.” Vice, 7 Apr. 2020, www.vice.com/en/article/jge39g/taking-care-of-each-other-is-essential-work.
Edlinger, Gabriela, Bernhard Ungericht, and Daniel Deimling. “Enoughness: Exploring the potentialities of having and being enough.” ephemera: theory & politics in organization 21, no. 3 (2021).
Illich, Ivan. 1973. Tools for Conviviality. First edition. New York: Harper & Row.
Mountz, Alison, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu et al. “For slow scholarship: A feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14, no. 4 (2015): 1235-1259.
Odell, Jenny. Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture. Random House, 2023.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. Care Work : Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Samuels, Ellen, and Elizabeth Freeman. “Introduction: crip temporalities.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (2021): 245-254.
Sandel, Michael J. The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? Penguin Books, 2021.
Zerubavel, Eviatar. Hidden rhythms: Schedules and calendars in social life. Univ of California Press, 1985.
