(I'll get to the title in a bit.)
This week we learned about cultural differences regarding time. Brother Ivers taught us about the concepts of monochronic and polychronic approaches to time.
Monochronic cultures believe that time is law. Deadlines must be met, appointments are to begin at their exact hour, and time is a valuable and even sacred commodity. Being late or slow is viewed negatively. Social relationships suffer if people don’t keep their social commitments to time. Time must be respected.
Polychronic cultures value other things, typically relationships, as higher than time. Time is not sacred and matters far less than social bonds. If a friend or family member needs something, that takes precedence over whatever else was scheduled at that time. Lateness is not a problem since there were clearly more important things going on than whatever was scheduled. Time can be ignored.
You can see how these views are very different. That can cause problems when people with opposing cultural understandings of time interact. I struggled with this a bit when travelling in Europe. I travelled there with a BYU-I study tour for three weeks. I had been looking forward to shopping overseas for foreign language books and interesting instruments. Unfortunately for me, stores were closed whenever I wanted to go shopping! Online many places were listed as open, but in person they were closed! It was quite common for the stores to close for an hour or two in the middle of the day in Italy. Employees would still be there sometimes, but they wouldn’t work with any shoppers and would say they were closed. France was even trickier. So many stores had signs on them that said they’d be closed for several weeks! It honestly felt like Paris was closed. It took one of the professors three attempts before he found an open French bookstore. In these other countries I visited, other things were far more important than standing in a store for regular hours for potential customers.
My lack of opportunity to shop was a minor problem compared to ones that happen to people living in cultures with different time paradigms than they’re used to. A polychronic individual in the US might have trouble with doctor fees for missed appointments or keeping a job with strict hours and time clocks. School truancy or lingering somewhere after closing time can have legal repercussions, too. As a TESOL instructor I should be a guide for polychronic students who need to adapt to a monochronic society. They won’t be culturally conditioned to understand the haste and immutability of monochronic timing. I need to make sure I teach them the new time paradigm of their target culture to help them be more successful in a new environment.
What are your experiences with monochronic and polychronic concepts of time?
I am Mexican, and what Brother Ivers says in his video is true, we give more value to people and feelings than to time. But that does not mean that we are always unpunctual and we do not want to be rude to other people, we just grew up in a different culture.
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