People cycle in the clock park in Dusseldorf on April 24, 2020 (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)
“Polychronic” and “monochronic” cultures differ in how they understand time, and they sometimes find it difficult to understand each other
That the passage of time be marked by a clock is a necessary condition for the normal execution of most of our daily activities: from traveling by plane to showing up on time for a work appointment. However, hours, minutes and seconds are not the only methods people around the world use to measure time. For example, adverbs like “soon” or “late” can mean very different references to time, depending on the person using them, the context, and the culture in which they are placed.
People use time and common spaces differently based on their history and culture, as is well known to anyone in the social sciences who studies the variables that affect general perceptions of time, as well as how it is measured. How we perceive and measure time also depends to some extent on non-verbal communication and is the result of a series of learning, interaction and socialization processes even before clocks are involved.
One of the most frequently cited distinctions in the perception of time is that between “monochronic” and “polychronic” cultures, which is also used in work and business contexts to analyze and discuss different approaches to time management. The distinction was defined in the 1960s by American anthropologist Edward Hall, one of the most influential scholars of nonverbal communication and proxemics (the branch of semiology that studies the importance of interpersonal spaces in social interactions).
In monochronic cultures, Hall wrote in the 1959 book The Silent Language, time is viewed as linear and people are expected to do one thing at a time. It is also possible to do several at the same time, but each time according to a program that has a beginning and an end. This is the case in most Western cultures, where delays and interruptions are less tolerated for this reason, Hall wrote, and where, for example, waiting to meet the person at an international meeting is considered unacceptable. This is because there is a tendency to believe that the monochronic perception of time is the only possible one and that therefore the attention of the person one is meeting with is only focused on the planned meeting.
In a monochronous system, time is generally measured, organized, and managed as a series of discrete units. And this perception is also the basis of metaphorical expressions, in which it is understood as something tangible: waste, find, end, save time, for example. All expressions that make less sense in polychronic cultures, such as in large parts of Latin America and Asia. In polychronic cultures, time is not viewed as a set of units, but as a continuous and flexible experience in which it is normal to do multiple things at once and pay attention to multiple aspects of life, work, and social relationships as needed to address the needs of the moment.
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According to Hall, monochronic time is arbitrary and learned, and because it is so deeply embedded in the fabric of monochronic cultures, we are little aware of how much it shapes our lives, from social and professional to sexual. For Hall, time in monochronic cultures is essentially an empty container waiting to be filled, one thing at a time, and people rate themselves by how much and how they fill it.
In polychronic cultures, the mere notion that time can be wasted is difficult to understand, since the perception of time is more about engaging people and completing the action than respecting schedules. In these contexts, it’s also perfectly normal to run multiple activities at the same time, according to Hall, citing the example of souks in the Middle East, markets where “vociferous customers are vying for the attention of a single employee who wants to serve them all at once.” ».
A market in New Delhi, India on November 12, 2022 (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)
Another distinction theorized by Hall—often associated, albeit more nuanced, with the distinction between monochronic and polychronic cultures—is that between high-context and low-context cultures. In the first type, context and the multiple aspects of nonverbal communication generally play a large role in social interaction. And that kind of contextual awareness of punctuality or speed tends to be more prevalent when the perception of time is polychronic.
In a 2015 conversation with the Atlantic, David Andrews, author of the book Why Does the Other Line Always Move Faster?, linked the distinction between monochronic and polychronic cultures, and between low and high context cultures, also with the bias towards or Don’t stand in line waiting for your turn. In one case, queuing is normal behavior, in the other case, other criteria communicated from time to time may be more relevant for the development of the action.
In polychronic cultures, Andrews argues, there is a greater propensity to communicate shared values within the group, while in monochronic and low-context cultures there is no need to share information about the context to make a decision, and more or less rigid regulated behaviors prevail Rules and Practices. “The fact that in the United States we look at order of arrival as a key criterion for deciding what is right shows that we are a context-poor and monochronous culture,” Andrews said. “We think that time flies, no matter how we experience it, we consider it very objective.”
According to Andrews, while lines tend to form in monochronic cultures, different behaviors can emerge in a polychronic culture depending on the circumstances. For example, it may be normal to give priority to older people or mothers with children and to push them through the crowd to be served first: “But these decisions require a lot of cultural context.” There are also cases and cultures where the two Behaviors—forming queues and giving priority to some people—actually coexist.
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According to Hall, the main characteristic of monochronic cultures is the idea that time is an unchanging constant, that it is the same all over the world and is simply sorted into different time zones. Rather, experiences in international relations and in intercultural relations show that time is rather a set of concepts, events and rhythms related to an extremely broad and heterogeneous set of phenomena.
A mall in Manhattan, New York on April 4, 2022 (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
For a time in the 1950s, Hall worked for the US State Department at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), the principal institute devoted to training diplomats. And in The Silent Language he described the frequent difficulties Americans encountered in dealing with the Arab world and recounted a time when an agricultural expert went to Egypt to teach local farmers some techniques. At one point he asked the interpreter to ask a farmer how much he thought the field would produce that year, and the farmer got nervous. “He says he doesn’t know,” said the interpreter, softening the farmer’s answer.
The expert recognized that something had probably been misunderstood in the conversation, but didn’t understand what. Hall wrote that some time later he himself learned that in much of the Arab world anyone who tries to predict the future is considered “half-crazy” because “only God knows the future and it is presumptuous to even talk about it.” .” .” Therefore, when the expert asked the farmer what he thought of the future, the Egyptian farmer was probably offended because he thought the American thought he was crazy.
In the 1983 book The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time, Hall described other instances of profound differences in perceptions of time due to differences in linguistic context. In monochronic cultures, time is perceived as something real and tangible “because we can assign a numerical value to it,” he wrote. This does not happen, for example, in the Hopi language: a language spoken by a group of about 6,000 Native Americans in northeastern Arizona and has long been the subject of research by American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf.
Verbs in the Hopi language have no tense: they are distinguished by other aspects, such as the duration or completeness of the action being spoken about. In general, they establish a relationship between the speaker and their knowledge or experience of what they are talking about. In many languages, including English and Italian, time-related words like “summer” and “winter” are nouns, giving them “a material quality because they can be treated, numbered, and pluralized like any other noun.” ,” Hall wrote: in other words, “are treated as objects.” In the Hopi language, the seasons are instead treated more as an adverb of sorts, to find the most assimilable part of the language in languages other than Hopi.
For example, the Hopi cannot say, “Summer is hot,” for summer is the quality of that which is hot, just as an apple has the quality of being red. “Summer and heat are the same, summer is one condition: heat,” Hall wrote. And there is nothing in the word “summer” that implies the meaning of the passage of time as is implied in many languages with which we are familiar. According to Hall, these linguistic differences are also the basis for the different perception of time and for the different values that each culture attaches to concepts such as speed and punctuality.
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Different perceptions of time are often accompanied by other cultural variables that can complicate communication in the context of international relations, such as the declared willingness to take on tasks and responsibilities. In 2016, Kara Alaimo, a professor of communications at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey and a former media coordinator at the United Nations, described these difficulties in a New York Times article entitled “How to Deal with a Foreign Colleague Who Isn’t can say no”.
Groups of people try to catch beanbags thrown during the Mamemaki spring ritual at Zojo-ji Buddhist temple in Tokyo, Japan, on February 3, 2020 (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
Alaimo explained that when she was working at the United Nations and planning remote meetings every two weeks, she asked colleagues from other countries if they were able to provide information within certain deadlines. And usually, most would no doubt answer “yes,” only that deadlines were almost never met, leaving Alaimo confused and confused. “At one point, my South African boss had to explain something to me that would never have occurred to me: in many cultures, it’s rude to say no,” Alaimo wrote.
Some people, he wrote, would say “yes” to any request, regardless of whether or not they could meet a requirement. Showing a willingness to work together was a priority for them over punctuality, a value that in some cases is completely absent. Alaimo wrote that once while serving in President Barack Obama’s administration as international affairs spokesman at the Treasury Department, he traveled to Africa with a senior government official to meet with a head of state.
When they arrived at the office where the meeting was scheduled, the President they were supposed to meet with was not there. “My boss was angry that in ‘monochronous’ cultures like the United States, people are expected to be on time and meet deadlines,” Alaimo wrote. But “in polychronic cultures, such as sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, plans are less stable and constantly changing.”
Alaimo then also mentioned the distinction between high-context and low-context cultures. She attributed her tendency to say “bluntly and directly” when she wants something done to being used to living in a low-context culture like the United States. And he wrote that people in context-rich cultures like Asia may instead “communicate in more subtle ways” and that it’s necessary to “use body language and other contextual cues to understand that your colleague just told you.” Yes, actually he just said he didn’t agree with your plan.”
This doesn’t mean that cross-cultural communication is impossible, just that different cultures “may take different paths to achieve similar goals,” Alaimo wrote. He concluded by pointing out that instead of asking colleagues from other countries to meet deadlines, he began to work better with them, “asking what was possible for them and what they thought was best in their country or culture.” .
A group of people celebrate Legacy Day, a South African national holiday, at Zoo Lake Park in Johannesburg, South Africa, on September 24, 2020 (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)
While the notions of monochronic and polychronic time are typically associated with language groups and communities, over time they have also been associated with societies, professions, and other heterogeneous groups of people. They have been circulating for some time, particularly in analysis and insight into corporate cultures, where they are often used to define two different approaches to work, time management and meeting organization.
In contexts that favor polychronic time, interactions between colleagues mostly take place in continuous sequences of time that are not defined by a program with a beginning and end. People work on multiple projects or complete multiple tasks at the same time. And schedules and schedules are usually tailored to people’s needs and are designed to encourage relationship development rather than project completion. As a result, the outcome of scheduling is less predictable and meeting and meeting rescheduling is quite common.
In work environments where time management is based on monochronous time instead, events occur sequentially or in a linear pattern and time is strictly measured by the clock. Meeting deadlines is considered very important as a single delay or issue down the chain can disrupt task completion. And productivity and punctuality tend to rank higher than relationships between individuals.
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