Feminist social theory needs time.Reflections on the relation betweenfeminist thought, social theory andtime as an important parameter insocial analysis^

Barbara Adam

Abstract

This paper explores the relation between feminist concerns, socialtheory and the multiple time aspects of social life. It is suggested thatwhile feminist approaches have been located in classical politicalphilosophy, the same imposed classification has not occurred withrespect to social theory perspectives. Rather than seeing this as anacademic gap that needs filling, it was taken as an opportunity to takenote of the wide variety of feminist approaches to methodological andtheoretical issues and to relate these to concerns arising from a focus onthe time, temporality, and timing of social life. It is argued that afeminist social theory, as an understanding of the social world throughthe eyes of women, is not only complemented by such a focus on timebut dependent on it for an opportunity to transcend the pervasive visionof the 'founding fathers'.

Introduction: the first attempt

There exists an elusive bond between feminist approaches to socialtheory and my work on time. I first explored this connection in1985 in a paper to a multidisciplinary women's colloquium. I didnot get very far in that first attempt, where my attention was drawnto the problems of dichotomous and one dimensional analyses inrelation to experience and consciousness. A focus on timehighlights multiple realities that all bear on social life simultaneously,thus forcing an approach that transcends dualisms and dichotomousthinking. A preoccupation with the time aspects of everyday lifenecessitates an approach where personal experience, consciousness,existence, and context have to be taken as sources against whichrational theories have to be checked. By focusing on just one short

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moment of consciousness, I intended to make visible that whichwe know at a non-discursive level and take most for granted. Minewas one of the last papers and, as the conference progressed, Isensed that despite our overtly different concerns we werespeaking the same language, encountering the same conceptuallimitations, and seeking common goals. None of this commonground, however, was obvious or explicit, and I could not be surethat the others would feel as I did, after they had listened to mypaper. They did. But, like me, they could not formulate thereason, or recognise the source of that which had touchedanthropologists, biologists, literary critics, painters, philosophers,poets, psychologists, and sociologists alike. I had promised myselfthen that 1 would do more work to try and discover the nature ofthe bond we experienced during that cross-disciplinary meeting.

Immersing myself once more in feminist literature I found itmuch easier to isolate what I was not seeking. The differentapproaches with respect to political philosophy, for example,could be excluded. Not only was there no necessary connectionbetween feminists' political philosophy and their approaches tosocial theory, but the very exercise of imposing existing categorieson a movement that explicitly seeks to transcend them, seemedpointless and even counter-productive. The self-professed prefer-ences for perspectives and methods, on the other hand, proved afar more useful focus. It demonstrated that this association withthe perspectives of specific founding fathers was a 'making do', achoice of social theory in the absence of more appropriateframeworks for understanding. I found feminist social scientistsaligning themselves with a whole range of perspectives thatspanned from structuralism to ethnomethodology. Only thecommitment to a critical approach and to action for change wascommon to all. This radical approach connects with a realisationthat the transcendence of present perspectives is a necessaryprecondition to the feminist goal of overcoming oppression.Feminist scholarship, it is argued by Bowles (1983) and Coyner(1983), must go beyond received perspectives and develop its owntheories and methods. Not the goal itself, however, but theimplications on the methods that were to achieve that goal, caughtmy attention. That which feminists identified and defined as 'theproblem', led me back to that elusive connection between feministconcerns, my work on time, and social theory.

If one takes as given that feminists see the transcendence of theandrocentric world view as one of the necessary conditions for

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overcoming women's oppression, and if one then begins to explorewhat this implies, then one finds a rich source of reflections andintuitions. Thus, not the nature of oppression but feminists'thoughts on overcoming the androcentric world view is the focus inthis paper. I want to outline just a few of those visions since it isthese that overlap with the implications arising from my work ontime.

Feminist social science: ethic and methodology

Science has been identified by feminists as one of the majorexpressions of this world view; and writing on the nature ofscience, they have produced a wide-ranging and coherent critiquewith respect to objectivity, dualisms, the idea of truth, and linearcausality. Closely related are thoughts on methods, as they centrearound the relation of the observer and the observed. Anotherfeminist focus of interest to this discussion is on knowledge. Itdeals with reflections on the forms knowledge does, could andshould take and it is concerned with the way knowledge isobtained, maintained and furthered; how we know as people andscientists. To Stanley and Wise (1983b: 193) feminism is a way oflife that links and permeates their everyday lives, their beliefs, andtheir research. For others it has become both an ethic and amethodology. The idea that the person is not separable from herbiography, her context, her beliefs and values, her needs and hermotives, her material condition (and lately even her biology)found expression in many of the writings and has a particularlystrong bearing on feminists' attitudes towards the goal of scientificobjectivity.^

Many feminist scholars insist first, that this contextual personhas an inevitable bearing on her research; that values, motives andmaterial conditions influence choice of topic, the nature of theproblem to be researched, methodology, the interaction with theobject of her research, and the findings. Second they contendthat subject and object are inseparable; that the two have to beunderstood in terms of an essential interactive relation that cannotbe separated or abstracted. Third they understand values asinextricably bound to facts and the activity of scientific research.Experiencing, doing, judging and seeing are all thought to bemutually implicating. As DuBois (1983: 214) writes, 'We experienceand understand, discover and create, judge and envision, grasp

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and take care of.' To pretend otherwise is to falsify one's work.With this strong emphasis on the personal plus context, the idea oftruth takes on a different meaning.' No longer something fixed,permanent and absolute it comes to be understood as an ongoingprocess, socially constructed as well as constructing, and open tochallenge.

Closely connected to the critique of scientific objectivity,neutrality and truth is the feniinist rejection of understandingsocial life in terms of dichotomies.'' Male or female, gender or sex,public or private, rational or intuitive, mind or body, objective orsubjective, left or right, right or wrong - none are acceptableas mutually exclusive choices. Refusing to accept traditionaldichotomies, it is argued, means re-thinking the distinctions and tohold them up for scrutiny. Ironically, another dualism emergesfrom the proposed alternatives to dichotic thinking. Existingdichotomies are either re-conceptualised as genuine dualities,mutually implicating and defining each other or, alternatively,they are understood as a spectrum; as variations along acontinuum. Existing dualisms are recognised as unacceptable onseveral grounds. It is argued that dualisms not only confuse modesof analysis with their content but, as Bleier (1984: 197-201) shows,through their usage we impose a divisive hierarchical order on ourreality. Thus male, for example, is not only dichotlcally defined inrelation to female, but ranked in order of priority. As scientificclassifications these dichotomies thus read as objective oversubjective, rational over intuitive, mind over matter. To recognisethem as imposed classifications, that are employed as aids tounderstanding, can therefore remove some of their alienatingaspects and open up a possibility for their alternative usage. Notonly have feminists provided a critique of dichotomous thinking,exf>osing it as alienating, divisive and hierarchical, but they havealso shown it to be falsifying experience (Mies 1983: 111).Dualistic conceptualisations, it is argued and demonstrated, makeus lose touch with the infinite complexity of every day experiences.Tiirough them we lose sight of relationships, connections and thecontinuum of phenomena and events. When social reality isunderstood as an ongoing, interactive and constitutive process,timeless dichotomies become meaningless.

Feminists ask that theoretical understanding be kept in touchwith, and checked against the complexity of ongoing experienceand consciousness in their social historical, natural and artifactualcontext; in other words, all those aspects that make up the totality

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of our every day living. This entails that the personal beacknowledged not only as valid but essential. It implies thatinterconnections, relations, and transactions - all those temporalaspects of social life - are important. It also means that we musttake note of the influence of the physical, biological, psychological,technological and historical aspects, whenever we are focusing ona particular aspect of social life.

In terms of approach it constitutes the difference between focusand isolation. When we are focusing the rest of our visual field isnot disappearing in the way it does when we are isolating andabstracting some part or event in order to study it. It is thedifference between an embedded understanding where both thethinker and the object of understanding remain an integral aspectof a totality, and one that severs those infinite connections. We canonly focus, but not isolate ecologically.'' Concern with life - interms of giving, sustaining, preserving, nurturing, and aiding it -necessitates appropriate forms of understanding. Unlike theconcern with dead things it needs an approach that is notfragmentary, static, linear and dichotomising, but one that seeksdynamic interrelations where that which is not studied remains,nevertheless implicated in that which is being explicated. Theconnection between feminist and ecological concerns thus seemsan obvious one, and eco-feminism possibly an ideal direction forthe future. For social scientists there is, however, a problem withadopting an ecological framework of analysis. This problem, Iwant to suggest, cannot be overcome until the ecological rootmetaphor of organism, and the whole issue of holistic, functionaland systemic analyses, have been re-addressed and resolved.Functionalism and systems theory are, after all, the only per-spectives that none of the feminist scholars whom I haveencountered in my research, have identified themselves with. Ishall come back to the issue of holism a bit later in the paper.

Feminist social theory: conceptualising the invisihie

Hardly any of the above critiques, it must be noted, are unique tofeminism. Most of it has been said before; and said better. Takensingly, the critiques do no more than put the emphasis on thoseaspects that are opposite to the traditional scientific approach. Bystressing experience and practice over theory, wholes over parts,ecological interconnectedness over idealised isolation, process

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over structure, values and passionate commitment over distancedneutrality, and gender over sex, feminists may be redressing a lostbalance, but they are doing it by employing the very approach theyseek to transcend. In other words, new dualisms are used toexorcise the traditional ones. If, however, we take the feministthoughts on science collectively, and in conjunction with theirapproaches to nature, history, theory, and knowledge, then thoseintuitions and reflections connect to form a coherent body ofthought. What emerges is an approach that can no longer besqueezed into existing marxian, critical, structuralist, symbolicinteractionist, phenomenological, or ethnomethodological per-spectives.

While those aspects that feminists identify as important can berecognised as a distinct approach, the latter does not yet constitutea social science perspective, or feminist social theory. This overallapproach highlights points of departure and areas of concern.Despite its coherence, however, it is as yet no more than a way ofsensing and knowing and, as Jagger (1983: 376) observes, it lacks aconceptual framework to give clarity to the vision. What is neededis a theoretical framework that can genuinely connect experience,context, pattern, process and events; one that can simultaneouslyaccount for continuity and change, the influence of the past, thevisions and intents of the future, and the constitution of thepresent, without losing sight of social relations of power. For sucha perspective feminists need a conceptualisation of the social worldthat is outside the range of existing social science frames ofmeaning. Attempts to achieve those very aims have, of course,been made by other, non feminist social scientists.'' Their workthus needs to be discussed in any account of the social world thatshares these aims.

Emphasising the need for a theoretical framework is, however,fraught with difficulty, since the feminist approach to theory hasbeen a reticent and wary one; even one of denial. Only recentlyhave feminists begun to write about the necessity, inevitability andpower of theory.' In these latter writings the emphasis is on praxis;the fusion of theory and practice. Duelli Klein (1983: 95) writesabout the realisation that the two cannot be separated, pointingout that 'theory and practice of a woman's experience are notsplit'. Beyond this classical dictum of German idealism, there is acall for women to become aware of their theories and baseassumptions, and the need for these to be continuously checkedagainst experience. This constant checking and sensitising towards

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an awareness of the relation between theory, consciousness, andexperience, is to prevent what Stanley and Wise (1983: 201) call'de-corticated theory'. It is this type of theory, they suggest, that is'essentially speculative and concerned with abstractions, notgrounded in living experience', rather than theory as such, thatneeds to be recognised as the problem. While marxian praxis andexperientially based, 'grounded theory' find general approval,they are not the means to overcome what might best be expressedthrough Gramsci's concept of hegemony. If we accept thefeminists' assertion that the social world has, thus far, been viewedthrough the eyes of men, and consequently understood, con-ceptualised, and theorised by men; and if we further accept thatwomen are excluded from those conceptualisations, then theproblem of theory takes on yet another, far deeper and morefundamental dimension.

Feminists agree not only that any understanding of humanbeings that excludes women is inaccurate, but also that a feministsocial theory will have to overcome this invisibility of women.**There is no faith, however, in the 'add women and stir' recipe,since an understanding of the social world with, and through theeyes of women alters both the method and the vision, theepistemology and the ontology. It invalidates the tradition.Finding a way of learning to see the invisible and to bring to aconscious, reflected, and discursive level those aspects we takemost deeply for granted, necessitates phenomenological action.Now we have finally worked our way to the substantive core ofthat elusive bond between feminist concerns and those arisingfrom my work on time.

Just one moment and invisible times

In contemporary social science both women and most aspects oftime form the invisible part of our understanding. Both have beenconsistently theorised out of existence. Where women have beenthe object of scientiflc investigation, they have been neutralised bythe very framework through which they were being analysed; justas the temporal world has been stabilised with a science thataccords merit in relation to the degree of timelessness that can beachieved. Thus, the challenge for both feminists and sociologistswith a focus on the time aspects of social life is not only to do and

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make science without recreating dichotomies, abstractions andobjectifications, but to learn to see and think in a new way; to re-think thinking, to review seeing, and to achieve understandingthrough consciousness raising. It is about learning to see and graspthe familiar world as strange and paradoxical.

To throw into focus that which is 'disattended" is to breakthrough its taken for granted character. To draw attention towomen and to time in conjunction with social theory can thusserve as the starting point for breaking through the seeminglyclosed circuit of theory and practice, by which existing modes ofseeing and understanding are perpetuated. Escape dependsfurther on a conscious effort to doubt, a method highly recom-mended by Brecht as the only one that can make us envisionalternatives to that which seems unalterable in both practice andconceptualisation. Radical humanists too see doubting as a centraltool for critical awareness.'' Yet, it is not enough to direct doubt atsome external 'status quo', without getting to know the tools ofunderstanding and their effects. In other words, we have to extendour doubt to include ourselves, our own understanding, and ourown base assumptions.

My own efforts, for example, are channelled towards bringingthe deeply taken-for-granted time aspects of every-day life to aconscious level of understanding, as well as seeking a time-infusedsocial theory that can accommodate all the aspects of time thathave a bearing on our lives. As an example of such a consciousnessraising exercise, of letting the material speak and looking at thefamiliar with the eyes of the stranger, 1 would like to give you anaccount of a short moment of my life. It had been the startingpoint for the paper I mentioned in the introduction and whoseunresolved thinking was the reason for the return to the issues inthis paper. I hope that it will serve as a demonstration of thoseelusive theoretical connections between feminist concerns andthose arising from a focus on time; and that it will make them morevisible and accessible.

'It is 8.00 am, Thursday, June 2"'', 1985.1 am in the kitchenwaiting for the water to boil so that I can make our coffee. Jan iskeeping an eye on the eggs. Miriam is getting ready for school,Tobias needs to be woken. The news is still focused on thehostage crisis. I am aware of my friend who works behind thescene for the breakfast television team and who provides us withinformation and experts on the situation in order to keep the

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issue alive as an ongoing drama, during a period when there islittle official information. I feel guilty for not having been to visither parents for such a long time.

Miriam says she is late. I tell her she is not. She explains to mehow the fact that the bus has consistently been early means thatshe is late despite the fact that she is early according to the clockand the bus timetable.

I remember that Tobias has asked me to find out aboutcontracts of employment. I am not quite sure where to begin tofind out about these things. Has not the Wages Council beenabolished recently? I do not like being landed with jobs likethat. Yet, I know that he has no means of finding out duringworking hours.

I am cold. It is meant to be the height of summer and I am stillfreezing in thick woollen jumpers. My father's ancient rule thatallowed us to run barefoot in all the months which have no R inthem, and which worked so well when I was little, is completelymeaningless here and now. Is my memory faulty? Does thedifferent place matter or has the pattern of the weather reallychanged? I know that we used to have disputes about this rule insome of the Aprils when it was already sunny and hot, and whenmy father would insist that the earth had not yet warmed upsufficiently. Cold summers, on the other hand, do not form partof my childhood memory of summers. Woollen jumpers insummer meant holidays on the North or Baltic sea where we feltcold because of the incessant wind that always had a certainedge to it.

While Jan is timing the eggs he is studying his diary. He hassuch a busy schedule of exam-board meetings, departmentalmeetings and tutorials. There will be no slack period duringwhich he could bring me home if I too were to go to college butdid not want to stay for the whole day. Neither of us likes thetrain very much because this means twenty minutes walkinguphill at the end of the journey. I could drive home myself andthen pick him up at the end of the day but that means an hourwasted with driving during the rush hour. If at all, I should go inthe afternoon since the morning is always my best time for working.

What would I gain if 1 came in? It is only the panic of nothaving found a way of making the link between my work on timeand feminist theory that makes me consider going to college inthe first place. Talking to people might help, but then I mightnot find anyone to talk to and I have a feeling that more books

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will not tell me anything that I have not already encountered inone way or another in the books that 1 have here at home. Yet, 1am bothered. What is it about feminist theory that makes it sosimilar, and yet so fundamentally different from my approach?No insights, no solutions, only loose ends without connections. Iought really to stay home and make use of the days before myperiod which always turn out to be my most creative time. Thisparticular time in my monthly cycle is always full of extremes. Itis the time when I am most vulnerable to illness and mostemotionally touchy while, simultaneously, being my time ofmaximum energy and creativity. How can 1 make use of thisenergy when the insights are still so far and few between? I willhave to stop this random reading and note-taking tonight, andtomorrow I will have to begin to work towards some outline.Something will emerge I am just not able to see it yet. Anyway Ishould believe myself what I have told Jan last night: Only if Ihave not come up with anything by Sunday is there cause forpanic. I think I am staying home.' (Adam, 1985: 2-3)

This account describes a moment which lasted no longer than ittook for the exchange of words between Miriam and myself aboutthe bus and being late. In the description of this short moment ofconsciousness the feminist concerns that I have outlined above aregiven substance. The feminists' emphasis on experience, con-sciousness and context, their focus on complexity, totality andinteractive processes, and their rejection of dualisms, objectivityand causal analysis, all are relevant to an understanding of thatmoment.

Those thoughts, feelings, memories, awarenesses, the workingknowledge, and the states of consciousness did not happen insequence. They were present simultaneously. The order in which Ihave recounted them is irrelevant. Any other sequence wouldhave been equally valid since nothing was causally related. Theidea of summer, my father's rule, thinking of my friend workingbehind the television scenes, the guilt about not having been tosee her parents, my unresolved thinking about feminist theory inrelation to my work on time, my concern to find out about thelegal situation with respect to contracts of employment, myweighing up the potential gains and inconveniences of going tocollege; this multiplicity of awareness, choices, memories, andconsiderations were all present at the same time; coexisting withinthis second of consciousness, that Thursday morning. Yet, despite

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this simultaneity there is sequential order. Nothing is jumbled,nothing happened backwards. The coexistence is coherent.

Re-vision

This one moment could be studied and interpreted in manydifferent ways by focusing on one or more of the multitude ofaspects. The emphasis could, for example, be on time-budgetaspects, on the extent of temporal horizons, or on issues of socialtime control.'" If, on the other hand, we disregard those existingsocial science practices, and focus on time with an open mind, thenthe process of 'seeing with new eyes- and re-thinking can begin. Itthen becomes apparent that the whole of that moment needslooking at. Time enters into every tiniest aspect of that moment. Itis implicit in waiting, in planning, in contemplating and in guilt;just as it is central to memories, the language structure, and to thespeech exchange as it was happening. It is fundamental tocontracts of employment, bus timetables, bus driver habits, to thetiming of actions, to rhythms - be they body or city traffic ones - toseasons and our relations to them, to the feeling of panic, thereluctance to waste time, and to the knowledge that there aregood, bad, and right times for doing things. It also forms anineradicable aspect of my identity which extends beyond thephysical boundaries of my being. Tuning in further, it emerges thatthe time inherent in that moment is multifaceted. It becomes clearthat time has not only something to do with clocks or timing butalso with sequential ordering according to priorities, that it relatesto irreversible changes, records and identity; to both cyclical, andprogressive processes and, last but not least, that it is usedand controlled as a resource. Time is simultaneously abstractedand reified, experienced and constituted. All these aspects of timeare equally important. None can be excluded if one seeks tounderstand that moment in its complexity. To isolate one aspectfor study without having all the others implicated is to falsify theexperience. With a focus on time this generalised feminist insightmay become (irmly grounded.

Such a time-sensitive focus may also be used as evidence insupport against dualisms since to choose one aspect in fovour of itsopposite, or to rank one above another, would make little sense. 1grow older while the rhythmic cycles of day and night, of seasons,of birth and death and of daily routines continue. The experience

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of time is neither more nor less important than the abstractresource or its constitution: no new dualisms here to exorciseexisting ones! Understanding from a time perspective needs to beecological. It needs to grasp the world in terms of dynamic andinterdependent relations since any other approach would destroythe very quality that is being sought. Yet, this holistic under-standing has to be different from the classical one where parts areunderstood to be causally connected to the whole, and where boththe function of the system and its past are thought to determine thefuture. From contemporary physics and biology in conjunctionwith Mead's 'The Philosophy of the Present', there emerges a time-based holism that is dynamic, historical, non determinist and canaccommodate non local, non causal connections." It is a holism inwhich the idea of everything affecting everything else is no longermeaningless because it theorises that very process. It is anunderstanding that places asymmetry, interactions, transactions,and irreversibility at the centre. In a framework of understandingin which there is no un-doing, not even un-thinking, every tiniestaction and every secret thought counts. All leave their irreversiblemark on the world. In this holism reality is created in the present -affecting all past and all future. Here dichotic thinking, thelanguage of determinism and parts in isolation do not even need tobe refuted. They have no longer any basis for existence.

So far this dynamic holism has not been extended to include thesocial issues of power and control.'^ There is, however, nothing inits basic framework that would prevent such a necessary inclusion.Again, a non conventional focus on time forces such an extensionsince the time aspects of power and control are fundamentallyrelated and not divorceable from identity, timing, records orrhythms (Adam 1987). Once we understand the relation betweenthese multiple times, as well as their constitutions, we will be ableto encompass relations of power within this time infused ecologicalholism.

Conclusion

This paper seemed not the place to familiarise you with any of thedetail of time theory. Even without that knowledge, I hope, aconnection has become apparent between the feminist vision Ioutlined and a focus on the time aspects of everyday life.Dualisms, functional systems needs, linear causality, isolation into

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convenient chunks for study, extraction from context, objectivity,the belief in the past as prime determinator of the future, the ideaof truth, the social science practice of excluding all things physical,biological and psychological, they all need to be put up forreassessment. They have become meaningless from this differentangle of vision. I was suggesting that a non traditional focus ontime blows wide open what is taken for granted and understood asunalterable in social science. For this reason I see time as an idealvehicle for feminists and like minded scholars to achieve the sort ofmethods and theories they are unsuccessfully seeking at present.

What this focus will not provide is a better theory ofwomen's oppression, women's role in the labour market, or thesocial construction of gender. Eventually those theories too wouldbe affected. But feminist theory as an understanding of thoseissues was neither my focus nor the level of analysis at which Iestablished the connections. I was concentrating on the nature offeminist social theory as it emerged from feminist reflections onscience, knowledge, and social science (lerspectives.

Women and the time aspects of social life were found to sharean invisibility within traditional perspectives. Furthermore, onlypartial aspects are ever studied and presented, as in the case ofwomen as mothers and wives and time as time reckoned bycalendars and clocks. With any extension from this basic vision weare forced into choices: clock-time or experience, social or naturaltime, women as workers or as mothers, as sex objects or aspersons. Within existing social science we have no means to escapefrom those imposed choices, just as we are forced to choosebetween perspectives since these are mutually exclusive in theirassumptions, aims, and methods. To escape this pervasive visionrequires therefore not more of the same but an imaginative leap.Time, it seems to me, is waiting to be used as the springboard.University of Wales College of Cardiff Received 19 August 1988

Accepted 26 January 1989

Notes

1 This paper was lirsl presented lo the BSA Sociologieal Theory Group Confercnccon Feminisi Theory in Sociology. University of Leeds. September l»-19,19(16.The rescareh has been conducted with the financial support of an ESRC grant.

2 For a feminist critique on scientific objectivity see Birke (I98A); Bleier (I9M);Bowles and Duelli-Klein (eds). (I9X.1) essays by Bowles. Coyner. Duelli-Klein.Du Bols. Stanley and Wise, and Westeott: Jagger (I9R3): Keohane et at. (eds).

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(1982) essays by MacKinnon and by Fox Keller; Stanley and Wise (1983);Whitelegg ei at., (eds), (1982) essays by Arditti and Rose.

3 For feminist writings on the nature of truth see Bleier (1984) chapter 8;Keohane el at. (eds), (1982) especially their introduction; Reinharz (1983);Spender(1983).

4 For a feminist critique of understanding through dichotomies see Bleier (1984);Bowles and Duelli Klein (eds), (1983) essays by Du Bois. Duelli Klein, Stanleyand Wise, Westcott; Capra I98lband 1982; Ehrenreich and English (1979);Glennon (1979); Leiand (1981); Jagger (1983) especially chapter 11; Tuana(1983).

5 For the connection tietween feminist and ecological concerns sec Birke (1986)especially chapters 6 and 7; Caldecott and Leiand (eds), (1983); Capra (1982);Daly (1979); Griffin (1982); Uland 1981; Merchant (1982).

6 See especially Giddens (1979). (1981). and (1984); and for example Reason andRowan (eds), (1981).

7 On feminists' relationship to theory see Bowles and Duelli Klein (eds). (1983)essays by Du Bois, Duelli Klein. Evans. Spender. Stanley and Wise; Jagger(1983) especially chapter 9; Kramarae and Treichlcr's (1985) entry 'theory'.

8 For thoughts on the invisibility of women through their exclusion in theory seeBowles and Duelli Klein (eds), (1983); Daly (1979); Delamont (I98()).Ehrenreich and English (1979); Jagger (1983).

9 See for example Fromm's Introduction to Illich (I98U).to These are the eonventionalfoei for the study of social time. See Adam 1987

chapter 4; the excellent essay by Bergmann (1983); and Elchardus (1988).11 For evidence of this emergent framework see Adam 1987 and 1988; Capra

(1981) and (1982); Baleson (1980); Bohm (1983); Briggs and Peat (1985); Mead(I9S9); Prigogine and Stengers (1984); Reason and Rowan (eds). (1981);Sheldrake (1983); Zohar (1983).

12 Mead's 'The Philosophy of the Presenf, does not extend to the social issue otpower. Giddens, for whom the social relations of power are central and whorecognises the importance of Mead's late work does, however, not build histheory of structuration on the assumptions of this emerging framework. Mead'swork could therefore not be extended and developed with Giddens' theory ofstructuration and the concomitant social theory approach to power.

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