Theories of time in the social sciences: positivism, post-structuralism, and realism

This blog post considers the basic theories of time that underpin the main approaches to social analysis. Before looking at theories of time, it is first useful to offer an overview of those approaches.

Social analysis has tended to build from one of two foundations.

• Either it has primarily been concerned with method, focussing on the practice of data-collection and seeking to ensure, ‘reliable’, ‘objective’, and ‘repeatable’ findings.
• Or, it has been born out of social epistemology, unpacking the interactions between knowledge, power, and subjectivity, in order to generate critical and emancipatory discourse.

A third foundation has long been present, though it has often been treated as a subset of the other two. This third approach to social analysis begins by sketching out a plausible and coherent ontology, establishing a metatheory about the nature of entities, structures, and processes, in order to ensure that research is best placed to theorise the underlying mechanisms of social change.

While these three foundations may go by many names and are applied in many different forms, it is useful for current purposes to pin them down to some basic propositions and some general labels.

• Let us call the methods-based approach ‘positivism’, defining positivism only to the extent that it has a central concern with the processes we go through in the methods of social research, primarily how reliable, objective, and repeatable that method is.
• The social epistemology approach can be labelled post-structuralism, defined in a simplified way as having a central concern with a critical epistemology, primarily in relation to complexes of power, knowledge, subjectivity, and discourse.
• Finally, the social ontology approach we can call realism, defined as having a central concern with a systematic ontology, primarily through the identification of layers of reality and mechanisms of social change.

In even simpler terms:

• Positivists start with and care most about methodology
• Post-structuralists start with and care most about epistemology
• Realists start with and care most about ontology

A number of brief caveats are worth making about this typology of the fundamental forms of social analysis. First, the terms positivism, poststructuralism, and realism are used in different ways by different authors in different contexts. Therefore, the reader should be wary about assuming that two authors means the same thing when they use these words.

Second, although we might say that the foundation of positivism is ultimately methodological, this does not mean that positivists do not think and write about epistemology and ontology. We can say the same about post-structuralism and realism. Indeed, post-structuralists and realists tend to engage much more widely and deeply with their underlying assumptions than positivists.

The third and final caveat is that this blog is written by somebody who (at the time of writing at least!) is personally and professionally allied with the realist perspective. So, please be wary of my own biases.

Ok, having offered these caveats, and acknowledged that this blog post is doing a lot of simplification, let’s now look at how these three perspectives theorise ‘time’.

Time is the ever-present and ever-absent core concept in social analysis. An explicit conceptualisation of time is essential for any coherent theory of society, because of the central importance of social change, and yet it is usually beneath the surface. Where it is made explicit, this is often in the lesser visited chapters and sections of theoretical tests. Theories of change are common in the social sciences, but theories of time are not.

In simple terms, we can say that a positivist theory of time functions like an old film reel. Data is captured at a number of time intervals. These data points are analogous to photographs in the film reel, so that when the film is played, we can see the passing of time. This is just like the way that time is showed flowing along a line graph. For the best quality data (like the best quality films), the intervals will be evenly spread and as numerous as possible. Another important aspect of the positivist approach is its connection to the natural sciences, and therefore to the ideas about time offered by physicists. This link is rarely made in research, but is most likely where positivists would turn if asked to produce a theory of time. While there are many contested perspectives in physics, one important feature is that it is concerned with what time ‘really is’ rather than how it feels and what it means for us humans.

The poststructuralist theory of time is, rather predictably, far more complex, but it makes at least three assumptions. Firstly, post-structuralists are concerned with the continuous flow of time, claiming that it cannot be chopped up into neat intervals; to do so would be to simplify to the point of meaninglessness. This is connected with a post-structuralist rejection of ‘entities’ and ‘essences’, because everything is constantly changing, in flux, and on its way to becoming something else. Secondly, there is a concern not with the objective nature of time (and they are indeed sceptical over whether such a thing exists), but with the subjective experience of time, especially how this experience is socially constructed. Thirdly, there is an insistence on the contingency of social change, the implication being that history is not preceding along necessary tracks and that the future is not yet written.

Finally, realism seeks to incorporate both the positivist time intervals and the post-structuralist flow, with the former labelled ‘synchronic analysis’ and the latter ‘diachronic analysis’. This leads to models of social change where there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, analysed as snapshots in time, but also a ‘during’, analysed as a flow of time. Therefore, there is a rejection of the positivist approach because it focuses on correlations and struggles to explain the actual mechanisms that lead to social change. There is also a rejection of post-structuralism’s theory of constant, contingent flux, because this leads to denying that there are any coherent or distinct entities in the world. A realist diachronic analysis of practices, processes, and mechanisms depends upon synchronic analysis of the nature of entities (including people), how they are structured, and the causal powers they possess.

All of these theories of time face problems, not least positivism’s struggle to account for the flux and subjective experience of time, post-structuralism’s struggle to theorise the objective reality of time, and realism’s struggle to overcome its dualism between synchronic and diachronic theories. The most important challenge for all theories is to be more explicit about theories of time, and engage with them as part of the research process.