Honore, Carl. 2004. In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed. New York: Harper Collins.

This text has a lot to say about the general culture of speed in contemporary society.  The main variable of concern here being time, how much of it we have, how we spend it, and the feeling that its always slipping away from us.  Honore refers to the “Slow Movement” as a desire for balance, where you speed up only when necessary and go slowly when necessary instead of speeding through everything. Interestingly enough, the author speaks out against “turbo-capitalism“, or rather this culture of sped up capitalism but explicitly says that they are interested in giving capitalism a “human face” rather than being against it. 

While I do appreciate the general message that the book has about slowing down it misses the causal forces behind the cult of speed: capitalism. Historical sociologist E. P. Thompson’s work reviewed the history of the clock, standardized time, and the disciplinary regulation of workers under industrial capitalism (Thompson 1967). Different social, economic, and political systems as well as positions have different modes of time.  Social structures are understood here as dynamics between schemas and sets of resources that empower, constrain, and reproduce social action (Sewell 2005:151). Capitalism plays a central role in the structure of time and your position in society. Those with capital are able to have control of how they spend their time. If an individual is working poor, the majority of their time is going to be spent working for their employer for a meager means of subsistence (instead of a living wage).  A means of subsistence is enough resources for the worker to then have to make to the next day, creating a reliability on the employer and making sure that without work, the worker cannot survive.

So while I appreciate the general message of this text, only certain people can really take its message to heart and apply it to their lives in the world we live in. 

References

Sewell, William H. 2005. Logics of history: Social theory and social transformation. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.

Thompson, EP. 1967. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present, 38: 56-97.