Fare il tempo. Riflessioni sulla temporalità

This introductory essay situates Sociology of Temporalities by Benoît Hachet within the Italian intellectual landscape and argues for the analytical relevance of temporalities as a key category for understanding social life. Moving beyond disciplinary boundaries between sociology, anthropology, history, and philosophy, the text highlights the fragmented status of temporality studies in Italy, where the notion of time has received considerable attention while temporalities have rarely been conceptualized as a distinct object of inquiry. Drawing on French sociological traditions and contemporary debates in the social sciences, the essay proposes a shift from treating time as a pre-given entity to examining the social processes through which actors actively “make time.” Temporalities are defined as the ensemble of practices, representations, and devices through which individuals and groups coordinate activities, orient themselves within society, and construct meaningful relations between past, present, and future. From this perspective, temporality is not merely a subjective experience or a cultural representation of time, but a collective, intersubjective, and empirically observable social practice. The essay demonstrates the heuristic power of this approach through examples drawn from work and care. In both domains, temporal organization reveals the moral values, power relations, and inequalities that structure contemporary societies. The temporalities of labor illuminate transformations associated with flexibilization, precariousness, and class differentiation, while the temporalities of care expose gendered asymmetries and the relational logic of interdependence. The introduction ultimately presents Hachet’s work as both a conceptual clarification and a methodological toolkit for analyzing the temporal dimensions of social existence. By foregrounding processes of temporalization, it offers a framework for investigating how social actors construct their worlds and how temporal arrangements shape identities, relationships, institutions, and collective futures.