Beyond 9 to 5: Your Life in Time

By Sarah Norgate

In Beyond 9 to 5, Sarah Norgate investigates the psychological, social, and cultural influences that affect the way we regard and are affected by time. Using everyday examples from around the world, her intriguing analysis unravels both the mental and biological mysteries of our relationships with time and provides a clear understanding of the links among behavior, brain, and genes.

Norgate begins by musing on the origins of our obsession with punctuality; the conflicting practices of rushing and taking things slow; economy-driven proverbs from highly industrialized nations-Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today-and how they differ from beliefs and attitudes in more rural areas; why some countries like Japan promote a 24/7 lifestyle while others still have trouble allowing businesses to open on Sunday; and which city moves at a faster pace, New York or Dublin? Norgate's examination of global trends yields surprising results.

Norgate then considers the biological effects of irregular hours, night shifts, cram sessions, round-the-clock consumption, and other potentially unhealthy characteristics of modern living. In addition, she looks at how our relationship with time evolves throughout our lives, from birth to old age, tracing the connection between longevity and memory and how such conditions as Parkinson's disease, addiction, sensory impairment, and autism change our perception of time.

Norgate concludes by uniting these threads to better understand the universality of our temporal landscapes. An engaging mix of cultural reference and research, Beyond 9 to 5 is a compelling look at what makes us human.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231140088
• ISBN13: 9780231140089
• Release Date: December 2006
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.4" x 9.2"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Informative

What I like about this book is that it brings in material that many introductory books on the social and psychological features of time leave out. In addition to the usual M-time, P-time, clock time, event time (etc.) kinds of themes, Norgate presents material on lifespan differences across political and cultural divides. For instance, she details connections between war, corruption, income, and nutrition on the one hand, and the onset of menarche and menopause on the other. She attends well to cross-cultural differences in the uses of children's time, and highlights the significance of one's position in a particular intergenerational "familyscape." She covers the basics about biological clocks and the neurology of timing, motion, and the judging of intervals; but she also includes chapters on time and human infants, as well as on the temporal "diversity" that emerges from various physiological disorders and addictions. These are excellent features in a general book about time. What the book lacks is a thematic or theoretical focus that pulls all of the data together. Frequently data are recited or a chart inserted with little attention to connections with other sections of the chapter or of the book as a whole. I just used this book in a university course that explored various dimensions of time, and student comments echoed these remarks. They loved the topics and the information, but longed for a stronger thematic focus. That said, however, I'll almost certainly use this book again due to the aforementioned strengths