Time structures are the key link between macro-systemic and micro-actor perspectives in social theory.

Evidence

One decisive advantage of temporal-analytic points of entry to social-theoretical questions consists in the fact that temporal structures and horizons represent one, if not the, systematic link between actor and system perspectives. As is well known, social changes can be either analyzed “macrosociologically” as alterations in “objective” social or systemic structures or investigated “microsociologically” from the viewpoint of a subject-centered social science as a transformation of logics of action and self-relations. While almost all varieties of social theory since Talcott Parsons have striven to overcome this structure/agency division, the question concerning the mechanisms by which systemic-structural logics and imperatives and actor orientations become mutually adjusted to one another or mediated with each other still remains perhaps one of the most puzzling and least well-understood problems of the social world. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 81

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks to the reader’s recurring interest in structure-agency mediation, a thread running through their institutional economics and sociology-of-trust material. — connects to: Modernity’s own self-observation forces time structures to become sociology’s central object — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 123; Temporal structures mediate between individual life-plans and systemic requirements. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 46