A rchive Date
[ 17-12-2000 ]
Category
[ Anthropology ]
sub-Categoy
[ Cultures ]
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[THE WAY(S) TIME FLIES
"Time flies", but not always at the same speed. Robert Levine explores the different tempo time plays to worldwide.
"The pace of life is the flow or movement of time that people experience. It is characterized by rhythms (what is the pattern of work time to down time? is there a regularity to social activities?), by sequences (is it work before play or the other way around?), and by synchronies (to what extent are people and their activities attuned to one another?). But first and foremost, the pace of life is a matter of tempo.
"The term "tempo" is borrowed from music theory, where it refers to the rate or speed at which a piece is performed. Musical tempo, like the time of personal experience, is extremely subjective. At the top of virtually every classical score, the composer inserts a nonquantitative tempo mark--largo or adagio to suggest a slow tempo, allegro or presto for ast tempos, accelerando or ritardando for changing tempos... Unless the composer specifies a metronome setting the precise metric translation of the notation is open to widely varying interpretation. Depending on the speed at which the performer sets the metronome, Chopin's Minute Waltz may take up to two minutes to play.
"The same is true for human time. We may play the same notes in the same sequence, but there is always that question of tempo. It depends upon the person, the task and the setting. One student may stay up all night to learn the same material that a gifted friend absorbs in an evening. The novelist might wait patiently for his next image, while his fellow writer at the newspaper races from deadline to deadline. Given an hour to spare with their child, one parent uses it to read aloud; another teams up in a demanding video game. My college student cousin travels around Europe for two months while his businessman father hurries across the same route in two weeks.
Alvin Toffler, for example, in his popular book 'Future Shock,' addresses the subject of tempo when he speaks of the psychic disruption that is caused by too much change in too short a time. The trauma is not caused by the shock of change per se, but by the rate of change. Whether considered over the short or the long term, and no matter how it is measured, there are vast cultural, historical, and individual differences in the tempo of life."
See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465026427/newsscancom/ for Robert Levine's "A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently." (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy action programs.)
The Pace of Life in 31 Countries
by Robert Levine
Western Europeans combine a fast pace with ample leisure, while Latin Americans take their time both on and off the job.
There is something about poking around in foreign cultures that compels a person to compare - to compare one culture to another, and your own life to theirs. In my own case, the comparisons always seem to center around time. For the last ten years, my dual preoccupations - traveling and social psychology - have converged on two questions: Which cultures are fastest or slowest? And how does this cultural tempo affect the quality of peoples' lives? My interest in these questions has been provoked by visits to other cultures; but I have searched for answers through the systematic methods of social science.
Comparing the personalities of different cultures is a tricky business. Labeling individuals is complex enough; how does a scientist presume to classify whole groups of people? To measure the tempo of life with any degree of systematic objectivity requires moving beyond anecdotal descriptions. We need to zero in on situations that are not only informative about temporal experience, but which also have the same psychological meaning in different cultures. Developing these measures has been more difficult than I had anticipated.
Eventually, three measures of the pace of life were developed: (1) walking speed - the speed with which pedestrians in downtown areas walk a distance of 60 feet; (2) work speed - how quickly postal clerks complete a standard request to purchase a stamp; and (3) the accuracy of public clocks. My students and I have made these observations in as many countries as we have been able to get to. In a few countries, I have conducted the experiments myself; more often, the data have been collected by interested students from my university who were either traveling to foreign countries or returning to their home cities or countries for the summer. In all, we have collected data in at least one large city in each of 31 nations around the world.
Thirty-one Countries Compared
Japan and Western European countries scored fastest overall. Eight of the nine fastest countries were from Western Europe, with Japan the lone intruder on this monopoly.
Switzerland achieved the distinction of first place, based on across-the-board high rankings: its walking speed ranked third, postal times ranked second, and - in one hell of a splendid finding, I must say - clock accuracy ranked first; their bank clocks were off by an average of a grand total of 19 seconds. Ireland ranked second, clocking in with the fastest walking speed of the 31 countries. Germany finished just behind, in third place, overall.
Japan was a close fourth. The three countries scoring ahead did so by very narrow margins - a few seconds here or there and the Japanese would have been in first place. There is, in fact, considerable evidence that Japan may be the fastest country of all. On the postal measure, for example, the Japanese had to settle for fourth, but where else besides Japan would our experimenter encounter postal clerks who sometimes wrapped the stamp in a little package, or, without being asked or required, sometimes wrote out receipts? We tried to correct for these extra seconds in our final tallies, but can one really give due credit to postal clerks who operate at near capacity speed while providing luxury service? The clerks in Frankfurt may have scored a few seconds faster, but it is difficult to imagine consumers there leaving the post office feeling like they had just made a purchase at Tiffany's.
Then there's New York City. In the main post office (the proud owner of zip code 10001), one clerk held my note over her head, and proceeded to announce, very slowly and very loudly, to the line behind me and to much of the rest of midtown Manhattan: "You mean to tell me that you want one lousy stamp and you're giving me a (speaking even more slowly and loudly now, her cadence beginning to sound like the score from Bolero) five-dollar bill?" After a short pause, and a handful of double takes at both the note and at me, she cranked up the volume a few more decibels, announcing: "God, how I hate this city." Not only was this my most embarrassing moment as a researcher, but her speech so frightened me that I forgot to time her progress. (New York and Budapest were the only cities where experimenters reported being insulted by clerks.)
Whether Japan or Switzerland deserves the gold medal for speed remains an arguable issue, but without question the most remarkable finding at the front end of the rankings was the consistently fast scores from Western Europe. Eight of the nine Western European countries tested (Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, Italy, England, Sweden, Austria, and the Netherlands) were faster than every other country other than Japan. The only "trailer" from Western Europe was France, which allowed Hong Kong (hardly a slouch in the hard-work category itself) to come in a notch in front of it. And even this minor slippage may have been the quirk of a rare environmental event: the Parisian measures were taken during the height of one of the hottest summers the city had ever experienced.
Before the study began, some colleagues predicted that one or more of the rapidly developing Asian economic powers would score the fastest. Michael Bond, an acclaimed cross-cultural psychologist from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, argued that his home culture would beat the field hands down. "The pace of life here (Hong Kong)," he proclaimed to a Time magazine reporter, "is a lot faster than anyplace else in the world." With the assistance of Bond and his students, we were able to gather several sets of reliable data in Hong Kong. But alas, Hong Kong not only scored behind Japan on all three measures, but was passed by virtually all of Western Europe. Hong Kong was, however, a bit faster than the three other industrialized Asian nations - Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea - which scored 14th, 15th, and 18th, respectively.
The United States, represented by its classic speedster New York City, was an unexpectedly slow 16th in overall pace. In fact, we were so surprised by the relative slowness of New York's scores that, as a reliability check, we sent out a second experimenter to collect a new set of observations; these turned out to be virtually identical to the first ones. New Yorkers did score a very respectable 6th place on walking speed, but were 23rd on postal times and 20th on clock accuracy.
Of course, straight-ahead speed may not be the single appropriate criterion for gauging the tempo of New Yorkers. One encounters a certain skill and assertiveness on the streets of New York that doesn't necessarily show up on a stopwatch. Whereas pedestrians in Tokyo are generally disciplined, meticulous, punctilious and even docile, New Yorkers are a study in anarchy.
Where Life Is Slow
There were few surprises on the slow end of the list. The last eight ranks were all occupied by nonindustrialized countries from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. The slowest of all were the great cradles of amanha, rubber time, and a manana: Brazil, followed by Indonesia, and, in last place, Mexico.
Slowness in such countries seeps into the very fabric of daily life. In our time surveys in Brazil, my colleagues and I found that Brazilians not only expected a casual approach to time, but had abandoned any semblance of fidelity to the clock. When asked how long they would wait for a late arriver to show up at a nephew's birthday party, for example, Brazilians said they would hold on for an average of 129 minutes. Over two hours! Among my own circle of parent friends, birthday parties are often planned to endure for a total of two hours. Forget about missing the beginning of the party. Parents who arrive 129 minutes after the scheduled start-up time are 9 minutes late for taking their children back home - a rather serious bit of temporal negligence to the host parent.
Fewer Brazilians wear watches than do people in the United States, and the watches they do wear are much less accurate. The predominance of inaccurate or nonexistent timepieces has also been incorporated into the culture of slowness. My favorite excuse from Brazilians who arrived late was, "O religion causou o meu atraso [The clock caused me to be late]" - meaning that their delay was caused by a watch that was slow or set incorrectly.
Even a person with a first-rate watch in Brazil finds it difficult to be on time. Few people have their own cars, and public transportation is unreliable, to say the least. On more than one occasion, my bus driver abandoned his vehicle in the middle of our route. Once he returned after more than ten minutes, taking the last bite on a sandwich, and thanked us all for our patience. Another driver once excused himself for "un momento" and returned some 15 minutes later with his groceries. In both cases, I seemed to be the only person who was losing confidence. "Calma, Bobby," my companions would say to me, as they did in many situations during my Brazilian experience.
In last-place Mexico, people who attend too closely to the clock can be a real nuisance. My colleague Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, with both an M.D. degree and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, grew up in Mexico but had divided his professional life between Mexico and the United States. "If you're invited to a party for a certain hour," Aguilar-Gaxiola observes, "it's understood that you should arrive late. If you show up at the scheduled hour - en punto - you may find yourself in the way of your hosts setting up or getting dressed. These rules about punctuality play a very important role in Mexican culture."
"Ah, where have they gone, the ambers of yesterday?" asks Milan Kundera in his novel Slowness. Many of them, it seems safe to say, are on the streets of Jakarta, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City.
Whither La Dolce Vita?
A few years ago, New York Times journalist Alan Riding contrasted the compulsive workaholism of the United States and Japan to the ease with which much of Europe relaxes in the pleasures of the good life. Under the headline, "Why La Dolce Vita Is Easy for Europeans... As Japanese Work Even Harder to Relax," Riding asked: "How is it that Europeans sit around all day drinking coffee, spend long evenings over dinner, dress elegantly, get up late, take long vacations... Why, in short, do Europeans live so much better than Americans?"
How do we reconcile the results of our experiments with this popular stereotype? Should we conclude from our data that La Dolce Vita of Western Europe is a dream of the past - that the Japanese and Western Europeans are the new stressed-out, time-urgent Type-A's of the world while the United States has finally learned to relax?
To answer this question, it may be helpful to look beyond our three measures of speed, which were designed to focus on facets of the temp of workday life. What about the duration of this tempo? How long are people's off-hours? Do they enjoy vacations? What is the balance between hard work and leisure? It is here that Western Europe continues to diverge sharply from the United States, and even more from Japan.
To begin with, the average work week is shorter in most European countries than it is in the United States; both have shorter hours than Japan. One recent estimate indicates that the average annual paid working hours are 2,159 in Japan, compared to 1,957 in the United States, 1,646 in France, and 1,638 in the former West Germany. Workers in Japan, in other words, put in an annual average of 202 hours more than their counterparts in the United States and 511 hours more than workers in West Germany.
Taking a 40-hour week as a base, these figures mean that the average Japanese salaryman spends five more weeks on the job than his colleagues in the United States and over twelve and one-half weeks - over three months! - more than workers from France and West Germany. Looked at another way, only 27 percent of the Japanese labor force works as little as a five-day, 40-hour per week job, compared with 85 percent in the United States and 92 percent in France.
It is notable that the difference in working hours between Western Europe and other first-world countries is widening. Until the 1940s, the average hours in both Europe and the United States had been declining in tandem for nearly a century. In the United States, as in Europe, the issue of shorter hours was at the heart of the labor movement from the beginning; the question of work hours was once the "cause of awakening" of the American laborer. "Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will," was the cry of turn-of-the-century unionists. But in the United States as a whole, the average work week has remained unchanged for more than half a century.
In Europe, on the other hand, the downward trend in work hours has hardly missed a beat. Unlike the United States, organized labor in Europe has kept the issue of shorter working hours at the top of its agenda throughout the postwar period. Workers in France - where work is sometimes viewed as an irritating, if necessary, interruption to living - are fighting for even more lenient contracts. In 1996, after French truck drivers snarled the country with a series of bitter strikes, the government conceded to lower their retirement age to 55. With that issue settled, unions are now focusing their attention on the length of the work week.
Western Europe also leads the United States, and Japan, by an even wider margin in vacation time. In France, for example, workers by law receive at least five weeks and often six weeks of paid vacation. Every country in Europe, in fact, has collective bargaining agreements guaranteeing minimum paid vacations ranging from four to five and one-half weeks. In most cases, these mandated vacation periods range up to six weeks. In Sweden, it goes as high as eight weeks.
Generous leave time is also provided for other purposes. In France, for example, it is official national policy to allow women 22 weeks of paid maternity leave and an additional year of unpaid leave. The social welfare states of Scandinavia go even further. In Sweden, for example, new parents are entitled to a combined 12 months' leave of absence at nearly full pay, and another three months at reduced pay.
In the United States, on the other hand, vacation time for most workers remains limited to the traditional two weeks - that is, if they have been fortunate enough to avoid being shifted to seasonal contracts, in which case they may get no paid vacation at all. In Japan, vacation time is even scarcer than it is in the United States. Although the average number of paid vacation days offered in Japan hovers around a respectable three weeks, the Japanese Ministry of Labor reports that only about half of this time is actually used. In 1990, for example, an average of 15.5 days of vacation time were authorized, of which 8.2 days were taken.
Statistics from a 1989 Eurobarometer survey confirm the impression that Europeans are more comfortable with the time in their lives. As part of this survey, respondents from each of the then 12 European Union countries were asked how they felt about "the time you have available to do things that have to be done." Averaging across the 12 countries, 83 percent of all respondents reported that they felt "very good" or "fairly good" about their available time.
Whither La Dolce Vita? Apparently, where it began - in Western Europe, where workers have not only mastered the art of speed and productivity at work, but seem to have managed to use it to retain at least some remnant of the good life in their leisure hours.
About the author
Robert Levine is professor of psychology at California State University, Fresno, and author of A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently, from which this article is adapted with permission (HarperCollins, New York, 1997).
Speed Is Relative
(rank of 31 countries for overall pace of life and for three measures: minutes downtown pedestrians take to walk 60 feet; minutes it takes a postal clerk to complete a stamp-purchase transaction; and accuracy in minutes of public clocks)
 | overall | walking | postal | public |
| pace | 60 feet | service | clock |
| | | | |
| Switzerland | 1 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| Ireland | 2 | 1 | 3 | 11 |
| Germany | 3 | 5 | 1 | 8 |
| Japan | 4 | 7 | 4 | 6 |
| Italy | 5 | 10 | 12 | 2 |
| England | 6 | 4 | 9 | 13 |
| Sweden | 7 | 13 | 5 | 7 |
| Austria | 8 | 23 | 8 | 3 |
| Netherlands | 9 | 2 | 14 | 25 |
| Hong Kong | 10 | 14 | 6 | 14 |
| France | 11 | 8 | 18 | 10 |
| Poland | 12 | 12 | 15 | 8 |
| Costa Rica | 13 | 16 | 10 | 15 |
| Taiwan | 14 | 18 | 7 | 21 |
| Singapore | 15 | 25 | 11 | 4 |
| United States | 16 | 6 | 23 | 20 |
| Canada | 17 | 11 | 21 | 22 |
| South Korea | 18 | 20 | 20 | 16 |
| Hungary | 19 | 19 | 19 | 18 |
| Czech Republic | 20 | 21 | 17 | 23 |
| Greece | 21 | 14 | 13 | 29 |
| Kenya | 22 | 9 | 30 | 24 |
| China | 23 | 24 | 25 | 12 |
| Bulgaria | 24 | 27 | 22 | 17 |
| Romania | 25 | 30 | 29 | 5 |
| Jordan | 26 | 28 | 27 | 19 |
| Syria | 27 | 29 | 28 | 27 |
| El Salvador | 28 | 22 | 16 | 31 |
| Brazil | 29 | 31 | 24 | 28 |
| Indonesia | 30 | 26 | 26 | 30 |
| Mexico | 31 | 17 | 31 | 26 |
Source: Author
Cross-Indexed:
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