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Week of 2 June 2014
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The Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist
International Business

The Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist

Robert Levine

Why we recommend this book

The Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist by Robert Levine. Where Zimbardo and Boyd cover the individual psychological mechanisms of time orientation, Levine covers the cross-cultural lived experience of time — his field research across multiple national cultural contexts documenting the specific ways that time pace, punctuality norms, and the relationship between time and social obligation vary across cultures with commercially consequential precision. His account of how different national cultures actually experience the passing of time — how fast life moves, what counts as late, whether the schedule or the relationship takes priority when they conflict — provides the most empirically grounded available complement to Hall’s monochronic versus polychronic distinction, covering the same mechanism at the level of field research rather than theoretical framework. For the entrepreneur who has read the framework and wants to understand what the time orientation difference actually looks like in the operational conflicts of cross-cultural commercial life — the meeting that starts forty minutes late, the deadline that was a guideline, the relationship conversation that displaced the scheduled agenda — The Geography of Time provides the most practically grounded and most cross-culturally specific account available.

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