Culture or Context: a Qualitative Approach Investigating the Relationship of Scheduling Styles and Situational Context in Uganda and Germany

What is it about?

It is often assumed that people from different parts of the world differ in the way they handle and structure time. One aspect of this points to differences in scheduling, namely that people in western countries mainly rely on the clock and/or calendars (clock-timing) while people from, e.g., african or latin-american countries predominantly structure their time around the fulfilment of inner needs or the ongoings in their surrounding (event-timing). In our qualitative-study, we show that interviewees from Germany and Uganda refer to the clock and/or inner needs/external information to about the same degree. More precisely, our data suggests that context matters: when people have to be on (clock-)time, for example when working in jobs with fixed working hours, they structure their narratives around clock-times. On the other hand, in their free-time, people tend to leave the clock behind and go with the flow of ongoings in their surrounding and their inner needs, independently from their country of origin. This suggests, that differences in structuring time might not be first and formost a matter of a different cultural imprint on individuals, but rather reflect different structures of daily life for many people in the respective regions of the world (e.g., in Uganda a large part of the population lives from small scale farming with little need for precise timing while in Germany most people are employed with relatively fixed working hours).

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