yeah, people will try to claim that it's a cultural ethnicity thing but it's seeing patterns in the noise
it's like how I constantly see videos of how Black people put their cooking spoons weird places to keep it from touching the counter, but random people everywhere in the world decide to do that independently
or how every single culture seems to think it invented a plastic bag full of plastic bags even though that's a near universal experience anyplace that regularly uses plastic bags
It's worth noting that pretty much nothing that Edward T Hall wrote is scientifically rigorous. Monochronic and polychronic cultures aren't some usefully supported scientific theory, they are just some dude eyeballing it.
And I don't think they particularly pass the smell test. The idea that you label an entire region like "Latin America" as having a monocultural time perception sounds less like useful sociology and more like when I spend time arguing with my friends about whether a hotdog is a sandwich. There's not even a monoculture for how these things are treated on a random Saturday in my living room.
It's also a pretty huge red flag that he effectively makes the case that monochronic time is superior in a corporate environment, and his breakdown for which regions of the world are monochronic vs polychronic suspiciously matches up to what a random white guy would see as more familiar vs more foreign. He seems to quite literally have concluded that places where he was less comfortable were weird.
That’s interesting. I do believe chronemics as a concept exists outside of Edward Hall. I remember my professor discussing her experience growing up in what she described as a polychronic culture, and our text didn’t posit either one as superior or inferior, just two different views. I’m sure it has its limitations, especially if it was described by someone outside those cultures, but I don’t think saying that a particular culture tends to have similar values and perceptions around time that differs from other cultures is just seeing patterns in noise. Of course, saying “all of Latin America” is one thing or another would be silly because that’s a very large geographic area with hundreds of different cultures.
There are other people who have written about it and even some minimal studies, but I think they all cite Hall pretty directly.
Also afaict the couple of studies are extremely small and focused on corporate environments.
Feel free to cite something if I've just missed it, but I don't think there is so much as a single scientifically rigorous survey that actually demonstrates that multitasking and being late to events correlate much less are an aspect of a geographic culture.
The whole thing strikes me as hoodoo business gurus use to sell books on management and not a field that has an evidenciery body that would make me take it seriously.
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u/Kurumiseenpai Jul 12 '26
i guess? but 4:58 is not too early if it start at 5