Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation

Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of AnticipationAuthor(s): Iddo Tavory and Nina EliasophSource: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 118, No. 4 (January 2013), pp. 908-942Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668646 .

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Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory
of Anticipation1
Iddo TavoryNew School for Social Research

Nina EliasophUniversity of Southern California

This article presents a theoretical approach for studying the coordina-tion of futures. Building off theories of temporality and action, the

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authorsmap three differentmodes of futuremaking—protentions, tra-jectories, and temporal landscapes—that actors need to coordinate inorder tomake sense of action together. Using awide range of empiricalevidence, they then show that these modes of future-coordination areautonomous from each other, so that although they are connected, theycan clash ormove in disjointed directions in interaction. By focusing onthe coordination and disjunctures of those three modes, the authors ar-gue that sociologists can provide a methodological axis of comparisonbetween cases; depict mechanisms through which other theoretical orempirical constructs—such as racism or late modernity—operate; andopen awindow into the ways in which people organize and coordinatetheir futures, a topic of inquiry in its own right.

eryday interaction, people usually have a feel for what might happenfrom anticipating the split-second back-and-forth of a passing hello to

1We would like to thank Lior Gelernter, Andreas Glaeser, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Rob Jansen,

AJS Volume 118 Number 4 (January 2013): 908–942

o Kameo, Jack Katz, Dan Lainer-Voss, Paul Lichterman, Eeva Luhtakallio, Joshicz, and the University of Southern California reading group for their careful com-and criticisms. We would also like to thank the AJS reviewers for pushing us toand further develop our arguments. Direct correspondence to Iddo Tavory, De-ent of Sociology, New School for Social Research, 6 East 16th Street, New York,ork 10003. E-mail: [email protected]

3 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.602/2013/11804-0002$10.00



an eternal life after death; a school year or a career; a hookup, an indefinitelylong romance, or a lifetime marriage. From the inconsequential to the por-

Coordinating Futures

tentous, any interaction includes a relationship to a future. Sociologists, phi-losophers, historians, and literary critics have shared this insight, observingpeople’s informal expectations in a range of contexts, but theway actors ori-ent each other toward their futures has not, as yet, become a coherent re-search program.In this article we begin developing a framework for such inquiry. First,

we argue that when people interact, they coordinate their orientations to thefuture. We then categorize forms of future-coordination into three basicmodes—ðaÞ protentions, or moment-by-moment anticipations that actorsusually take for granted; ðbÞ actors’ trajectories through time, which proceedin ways that are more or less culturally predictable; and ðcÞ plans and tem-poral landscapes, overarching temporal orientations that actors experienceas inevitable and even natural—such as the sequence of grades in elemen-tary school and a calendar’s grid.The remainder of the article analyzes the relations among these modes of

future-coordination. In contrast to sociologists who argued that these modesoperate in tandem or can be reduced to one basic form, we argue that theyare much more loosely coupled. Modes of future-coordination merge, de-tach, and interlace in everyday interaction. They interlacewhen actors placesimilar protentions on different narratives, when actors place similar trajec-tories on different temporal landscapes, or when actors ambivalently orientthemselves tomultiple futures at once. Though peoplemay implicitly attendto these temporal modes simultaneously, these are not nested, not necessar-ily all of a piece or always coherently rising from themicrolevel of protentionto the macrolevel of the temporal landscape.By treating future-coordination in this way, we can see the delicate chore-

ography that maintains actors’ shared orientation toward the future whileaccommodating motion, ambiguities, and missteps. They might creativelyplay with such orientations, they might feel inescapably tethered to an in-flexible progression of events, or anything in between. But in any case, theactors have to share an image of a future together, even if implicitly—at leastenough to coordinate action, if not necessarily enough to coordinate thoughtor desire.To show the usefulness of this approach, we draw on empirical cases that

describe different kinds of future-coordination. We start with the proten-tions that people use in conversation and work our way to the changes intemporal landscapes that go with Western modernization, the globalizedworld of aid agencies and recipients, and large-scale political shifts. We focusespecially on instances in which different modes of future-coordination are atodds: when protentions and trajectories are mismatched, when large-scaletransformations in temporal landscapes change people’s relation to the im-

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mediate future, or when more than one temporal landscape is in play at thesame time, and people can shift between them when enacting their own tra-

American Journal of Sociology

jectories.Taking this approach to the coordination of futures gives us traction on

several central sociological questions. First, it offers an empirical way toconnect microstudies of interaction to the institutional, historical macro-forces that are often left out of ethnographic and other “micro” studies. Itsuggests a concrete locus in which large, often ethereal-seeming sociologi-cal questions become tangible. Second, it provides researchers with a fam-ily of mechanisms through which other sociological processes—such as theconstruction of solidarities, the demarcation of class differences, or the devel-opment of “latemodernity”—take form in everyday life. Future-coordination,then, is both a sociological question in its own right and away to answer otherkey questions in sociology.Of course, ghosts of many potential futures haunt any interaction: any

negotiation of the future contains and manages uncertainty. People’s waysof managing and performing it are where the action is. Social researchersneed to notice how, in everyday interaction, people encounter and enact plu-ral, though not infinite, modes of future-coordination—how actors mutu-ally orient each other towards, and sometimes manipulate, a possible fu-ture together.

MODES OF FUTURE-COORDINATION

The question of how people anticipate and organize the future has beennear, if not at, the center of several streams of social theory and research ðseeAdam 1990; Bergmann 1992;Nowotny 1992Þ. Since any action has a tempo-ral dimension, projected futures are crucial for any discussion of action andagency ðEmirbayer and Mische 1998; Abbott 2001; Mische 2009Þ. So far,however, very few theorists have attempted to examine howdifferentmodesof temporal orientation relate to each other, and the few attempts that havebeen made have been relatively unsatisfying and disconnected from eachother ðsee Abbott 2001, p. 239Þ.2

2
Avery useful exception is thework of JohnHall ð1999, 2012Þ, who constructs a theory oftemporalities and futures based on the domain in which futures are operating, formal or-ganization, competition, utopia, and community ðor, earlier, diachronic, synchronic, stra-tegic, and eternal temporalitiesÞ. AlthoughHall presents a compelling phenomenology oftemporality, we believe that when actors are trying to make only one domain relevant fortheir interaction, it is often harder than Hall estimates for actors to banish all other do-mains from becoming relevant. By deciding on the domain of interaction before the fact,his approachmakes it hard to see how people may be coordinating their futures similarlyin different domains and differently in the same domain. Thus, as we develop below, in-stead of beginning with the domain, we begin with forms of coordination.
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Two of the most important efforts at examining the coordination of an-ticipation—those offered by Alfred Schutz ð1967, 1973Þ and Pierre Bour-


dieu ðe.g., 1973, 1977, 2000Þ—aim to mediate phenomenological literatureand theWeberian emphasis on rational action. Both discuss the relation be-tween immediate “protentions” ðthe “feel” for the immediate futureÞ andmore enduringWeberian “projects” ðthe rational andwilled aspect of actionin which one action makes sense only in relation to others in a string of ac-tions aimed at a specific endÞ. Despite their differences, both theorists thusbase their typologies on the individual’s “future experience,” focusing on thesingle ðalready socializedÞ actor. The questions these authors then pursueare the degrees of “complicity” between actors’ orientations towards the im-mediate future ðtheir “protentions”Þ and their plans, career aspirations, ordreams ðtheir “trajectories,” in our termsÞ.If, however, we want to understand how actors coordinate action, we

needmore thanwhatBourdieu andSchutz offer. Their approaches are evoc-ative, but they limit the kinds of questions one can ask. The theory of future-coordination that we develop in this article does not focus as exclusively onthe socialized individual’s encounter with an external world. Rather, wefocus on what happens during interaction, when people have to coordinateaction. There, we expect to find moments of disjuncture, when actors con-struct the anticipated futures that they must continuously calibrate for con-certed action to be possible.3

More specifically, our analysis focuses on ðaÞ tiny specks of future that areso immediate that they enter into the way we utter the next sound, make thenext move, or experience our present, as in the phenomenological notion of“protention”; ðbÞ a family of approaches that deal with temporal trajecto-ries, where actors explicitly or implicitly treat action as part of an unfoldingprocess with a beginning, middle, end, an emotional tone, and a cast of char-acters; this mode folds within it both intentional “projects” and more pas-

3
There are, of course, other possible typologies. Thus, the literature about the future canbe categorized according to the point of view—whose time are we studying: the research-er’s supposedly all-knowing eye or the actors’ moment-by-moment definition? Consis-tent with our emphasis on the coordination of collective acts, we only briefly touch onstudies that describe how states and other organizations develop in sequences, in whichthe ordering of transitions—to literacy, industrialization, secularization, e.g.—reallymatters ðe.g., Abbott 2001Þ. In this case, actors’ accumulated actions have unforeseenconsequences; the long-term evolution happens despite actors’ imagined futures. Inmoreabstract terms, the notion of future in these studies becomes synonymous with that of the“outcome.” Similarly, other research shows that sets of characteristics interact on an ag-gregate level to create differential positions and situations in later life, as generations ofquantitative sociologists have demonstrated. Additionally, we do not deal here with thevast literature regarding the experience of duration—the way in which time passes in ac-tors’ perception. For this aspect of time-consciousness, see, e.g., Bergson ð½1889� 2001Þ,Csikszentmihalyi ð1990Þ, and Flaherty ð1999Þ.
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sive movements within culturally expected narratives; and ðcÞ narrativesthat actors experience as so naturalized and built into their social institu-


tions that they treat them as inevitable. These include the impersonal,tightly scripted futures that Laurent Thévenot ð2006Þ terms “plans,” as wellas the temporal landscapes onwhichwhole groups live—calendar time; cos-mic, eternal, religious time ðZerubavel 1989, 2003Þ. Though actorsmust per-form such temporal landscapes and plans and they are thus not ontologicallydistinct from other trajectories, they usually “feel natural.” Indeed, actorsusually treat them as the unremarkable landscape on which action and in-teraction take place.In the following section, we flesh out these three modes of future-

coordination, showing what each contributes to an analysis of actors’ ordi-nary methods of anticipating and coordinating the future in interaction.

Protention

Action is always pitching toward an immediate future. This future, accord-ing to both pragmatists and phenomenologist philosophers, is not an after-thought or an external appendage stuck onto the business at hand. Husserlðe.g., 1960, 1991Þ called this a “protention”: a future-oriented part of actors’present. Actors, he argues, implicitly assume that they are engaged in a se-quence of events, orienting themselves and each other to what comes next.To illustrate this idea, Bourdieu ð1998, p. 82Þ describes a tennis player whoruns up to place and positions the racket in the exact right place for the ballto hit it, milliseconds before the ball has actually arrived. Protentions, then,are a constitutive aspect of action itself. In the words of Schutz ð1967, p. 58Þ,“action could be defined as a type of behavior which anticipates the future inthe form of an empty ½i.e., vague� protention.”Husserl and early phenomenologists were not interested either in varia-

tions within any one society or in variations from one society to another ðseealso Merleau-Ponty ½1945� 2002, pp. 476–504Þ. Rather, they portrayed pro-tention as a universal aspect of action. Drawing on Husserl, later social the-orists such as Schutz and Bourdieu stressed that protentions are not simply auniversal feature of human time-consciousness, but that they are socially con-structed and form an important aspect of social environments. The definitionof this environment is where they part ways: for Schutz, it is society as awhole.Withinagiven society, people learnwhathecalls a “cookbook”knowl-edge: vague recipes of action that can be more or less counted on to producecertain outcomes in that society. People grab these vague recipes, both on aprotentional level and for the more elaborate projects they may construct.Bourdieu pushed the socially stratifyingnature of protentionmuch further.

He ties different forms of protention to an actor’s positions in a social field,arguing that people’s social positions come with implicit future orientations,

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toward both the immediate and the longer-term future. Bourdieu arguesthat people who occupy different social positions thus develop different ha-


bitual protentions; these different orientations lead to different courses andstrategies of action and different evaluations of what is possible within a spe-cific situation. These, in turn, help reproduce social inequality. For that rea-son, as he repeatedly stresses ðBourdieu 1977, 1998, 2000Þ, it is important toobserve variations in forms of protention. This mode of future orientation iscentral to his notion of “habitus” as an embodied “feel” for the social “game.”If Schutz and Bourdieu both start with the socialized subject who already

“has” a structure of protentions, both Garfinkel’s and conversation analysts’understanding of protention focuses on actors’ constant need to assess and re-assess their anticipations of other actors’ next actions ðsee Garfinkel 1967;Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974Þ. Focusing on tiny stretches of time andsubtle shifts in tone or volume, pitch, speed, posture, as well as other forms ofprosody and embodiment, conversation analysts have shown how people ac-tively calibrate and construct their protentions by attending to each other’sminuscule cues. To take the most elementary example, people generallyknow how to take turns in ordinary conversation ðSacks et al. 1974; for across-cultural analysis, see Strivers et al. ½2009�Þ. One begins to speak imme-diately when the other finishes—without even the briefest of pauses, some-times even overlapping a bit. For such a feat to be humanly possible, con-versation partners have to begin formulating their turn of talk millisecondsbefore the other person’s turn ends, accurately and imperceptibly anticipat-ing the precise moment when the other’s utterance will end, on the basis ofchanges in prosody, bodily movements, and other cues.In sum, protention is the socially located “feel” for the immediate future, a

future that actors constantly calibrate in interaction and that requires amastery of interactional complexities that actors take for granted. This as-pect of the social organization of the future is crucial. All action and inter-action ðevenwhen people tacitly assume that they will have less than amin-ute togetherÞ entail protention. Remaining on this level, however, tells usvery little about the temporal environment. Specifically, it does not tell ushow actors connect these immediate futures to broader trajectories inwhichthey—usually effortlessly, though also usually with great, subtle skill—em-bed their action.

Trajectories

Whereas protentions deal with the immediate future on which actors havenot necessarily reflected, actors also place themselves within larger timeframes ðsee, e.g., Tavory and Timmermans 2009Þ. To understand any onemove in a series, the researcher has to observe actors’ often taken-for-grantedassumptions about where they are going. To use Andrew Abbott’s ð2001,

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p. 217Þ musical metaphor, a sequence of sounds cohere into something thatmakes sense as music, and that might even move us emotionally, only when


single notes or measures—protentions—make sense as elements in an over-arching, ongoing theme ormotif. This trajectory ðsee also Strauss 1993Þ staysrecognizable enough to carry the listener forward.Narrative.—Many have argued that humans, in their search formeaning,

tend to make any trajectory into a “narrative.” So we start with the kind oftrajectory that takes a narrative form. Narrative theories begin with Aris-totle’sPoetics ð1996Þ, which defines a narrative as an actionwith a recogniz-able beginning, middle, and end. This form of future orientation is the topicof a great deal of research in literary theory ðe.g., Kermode 1967;White 1987Þ,philosophy ðRicoeur 1984–88; Carr 1991Þ, psychology and psychoanalytictheory ðe.g., Bruner 1990, 1991Þ, and even quantitative sociology ðe.g., Ab-bott 1995; Abell 2004, 2007Þ. Here, temporality is a necessary part of anydramatic structure ðTurner 1969, 1974; Bruner 1991; Somers 1992Þ.This narrative approach has been crucial for analyses of ritual, media

spectacles, political intrigues, public scandals, and other events inwhich thestructure of temporality provides both the suspense and meaningfulnessthat people in a given society can recognize. These studies make it clear thatwhile people share cultural competencies that allow them to grasp shiftingtemporal structures, these structures of temporality do not require sociallyshared “values and beliefs” ðsee, e.g., Wagner-Pacifici 2001, 2010Þ. Ratherthan shared values, beliefs, or goals, it is the shared story structures them-selves that make it possible to coordinate action.In these studies of narrative, the emphasis on shared story structures of-

fers two insights. First, it pushes researchers to notice how crucially impor-tant it is for actors and observers ðof events in the news, e.g.Þ to establishwhat to count as the real beginning or the real ending of a sequence of ac-tions. Actors’ and spectators’ emotions and actions depend in part on howthey imagine each new event as part of an ongoing trajectory. People’s nar-rative constructions also tend to change as they tinker with them and re-imagine their trajectories in midflight. As Wagner-Pacifici ð2010Þ puts it,events are thus “restless,” and the narratives they are embedded in oftendramatically change as they are interpreted by different groups, and at dif-ferent times.Following closely on this is the second observation: the flexibility and nec-

essary ambiguity inherent in narration make possible not only agreementbut also disagreement. Disagreement is often a matter of different partiescounting eachmove as if it is in a different narrative. For example, when theAfrican-American celebrity O. J. Simpson was accused of murdering hiswhite ex-wife and her white male friend in 1994, many African-Americansand white Americans watching the trial understood the event differently. Ithad a different starting point and was part of a different trajectory, depend-

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ing on the observer. Many African-Americans tended to place it on a longnarrative that starts in the 1800s continuing a long string of false accusa-


tions, lies, and murder, in which white men lynch black men for imaginedrape of white women. White audiences, on the other hand, tended to makesense of the incident by placing it on a much shorter time line that startedwith Simpson’s personal psychology ðHunt 1999; Jacobs 2000Þ. Analyzingnarratives—focusing on the story’s temporal structure as well as its con-tent—shows howdisagreementworks and offers a useful way to understandit.Projects.—Beyond “narrative,” a second sociological theorization of tra-

jectories puts individuals’ active intentions and creativity closer to the cen-ter of analysis. Examining temporal movement this way has been central toapproaches that deal with actors’ projects, fromWeber ð1968Þ, through somestrands in interactionist sociology, to current rational action theorists. For allof these theorists, actors’ meaningful goals and ends—the “telos” they con-struct—are a starting point.While this slant provides an intuitively useful starting point for a theory of

action, it risks, asmanyhave argued ðsee, e.g., Eliasoph 1998; Fligstein 2001;Mische 2009Þ, seamlessly collapsing individual psychology with culture; or,on the other side of the same coin, it risks considering actors’ projects as ex-ternal to cultural scripts. The first is a problem because it assumes that indi-viduals have too little unfettered volition; the second, too much. The firstminimizes the inevitable tensions between social action and internal life; thesecond makes it seem as if individuals can enter society as if from outside,holding goals that come from somewhere else.Recent studies that work through this notion have attempted to find away

to leave room for actors’ intentional projectswhile avoiding these paired the-oretical problems. For example, Ann Mische ð2009Þ argues that individualvolition and skill are important though often overlooked in sociology’s questto find causal social and cultural structures that individual actors cannotsway ðsee Fligstein 2001Þ. Mische carefully shows, on the one hand, that cre-ative actors do indeed bring surprising newprojects to a public arena.On theother hand, she shows that, to be effective, their volition and skills canmakesense only within a socially shared style of coordinating action. Eventually,she argues, people can vary the themes enough to make them into a newtheme altogether, but they cannot simply invent new projects out of thin airand cannot make the changes instantly.On the face of it, a “project” seems very unlike a culturally shared “narra-

tive,” since “project” emphasizes individual volition while “narrative” em-phasizes a shared grammarwhose rules are relatively binding.Nevertheless,we are calling them both “trajectories” because their apparent difference ismostly a difference in standpoint: a narrative approach starts with cultur-ally available stories and asks how they unfold and shift in the course of ac-

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tion. It thus makes room for the skillful individual who might cleverly steerthe narrative. Narrative structures always have at least some human input


in them, somebody who invoked one narrative rather than another; and theindividual’s projects sometimes subtly transform these narrative structuresthemselves, giving rise not just to new stories but to new ways of tellingstories. At the same time, the concept of trajectory emphasizes that an indi-vidual’s projects, innovations, and creativity are never simply disconnectedfrom larger cultural frameworks ðsee also Dewey 1938; Joas 1996Þ. Trajec-tories—whether seen as narratives or as individual projects—allow roomfor individual creativity. But such creativity works mainly as a set of varia-tions on familiar themes.

Plans and Temporal Landscapes

The third mode of future orientation people coordinate in interaction usu-ally does not feel as intentional as the trajectories we just described. In-stead, this mode of future-coordination feels, to actors, as if it unfolds au-tomatically and would keep going with or without anyone’s action. Peopleusually experience this kind of future as so naturalized that it forms thebedrock on which other future-oriented trajectories are being performed.Our first sort of naturalized temporal orientation is what we call plans

ðThévenot 2006Þ. Plans are rarely dramatic or explicit. Rather, most feelalmost automatic to actors. Actors assume that the path is already laid, andall they need to do is take the expected or even required steps on it. Aftersixth grade, seventh grade happens, then eighth, and so on. Even thoughno one usually needs to do anything heroic or dramatic to make these planshappen, their nonautomatic, narrative qualities become apparent when vi-olated. Then, in retrospect, it becomes clear that to make it work, the actorhad to have had intuitions about how to be a good character in this story ðseeCalhoun 2004Þ. When actors retrospectively see this, they realize that those“plans” worked only because actors “got it,” performing them both on thelevel of protention and by planning their trajectories within it—in short,that they required actors’ ongoing activity.Normally, however, these steps are fairly rigidly set; steps in a corporate

chain of command, themilitary, or high school are tightly scripted on a veryfinite number of tracks. Actors in such situations may construct projectsand feel as if they aremanipulating an environment that is external to them-selves. They might also feel that control is in their own hands when theystudy hard and heroically pass tests. We acknowledge that there is, indeed,some leeway for individual volition involved here. But as Thévenot con-vincingly argues, actors can succeed or fail within such plans only becausesomeone else has already set them up, so that the actor knows and does thenext steps. After this initial setup, the actors treat the outline of the future

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as if it were a natural part of their world, and only then, as Mische andThévenot both argue, can they creatively improvise on the given theme.4


A similarly temporal orientation is also at the core ofMarcelMauss’s anal-ysis of gift exchange. Such exchange is neither “modern” nor bureaucratic,as the “plans” we just sketched were. It nonetheless appears to actors as asimilarly rigid means of coordination of the future: gift giving extends a re-lationship in a kind of temporal musical chairs, subtly bringing distant peo-ple together through exchanges that are supposed to demonstrate gratitudeand benevolence. The exchange requires a different rhythm from a mone-tary exchange; repaying a gift immediately after getting it looks too muchlike payment, which is fine if it is a payment in a market, but ungracious ifit is supposed to be a gift ðMauss ½1923–24� 1990; Bourdieu 1977, 1998Þ. Al-though the delay of the gift is thus crucial ðBourdieu 1977Þ, the temporality ofgift exchange seems natural: actors experience it as a deeply scripted way ofarranging the timing of relationships.These plans, with their air of inevitability, bring us to another kind of

naturalized trajectory: a temporal landscape that people take for granted sodeeply, it seems completely natural and universal. People in any given so-ciety share such temporal landscapes ðAdam 1990; Zerubavel 2003Þ, takingthem for granted, experiencing them as unchanging and impersonal.Changes in entire societies’modes of imagining and measuring time give

us hints of this naturalized and taken-for-granted landscape that peoplelearn to use in order to anticipate the future. Examples of this broad concep-tion of time can be seen in the vanishing of earlier, nonmodern modes ofmarking time. One measure was “a pissing whyle,” for example, which wasreplaced by the invention and proliferation of the clock ðThompson 1967Þ.The texture of time changes when the calendar based on saints’ days recedesand amore grid-like calendar takes over ðZerubavel 2003Þ. TheFrenchRev-olution tried and failed to change the week structure to 10 instead of sevendays, thus showing that the “natural” order of the temporal landscape de-pends on subjects’ concerted action. They can resist, aswell as enact, changeðZerubavel 1977, 1989; see also Vera 2009Þ. The difference between narra-tive trajectories and temporal landscapes is not one of kind, but one of de-gree on a spectrum of naturalization.Benedict Anderson ð1983Þ also shows how actors must coordinate action

to construct temporal landscapes. For the temporal landscape of the nation

4
This form of temporality was central in the Chicago school of sociology ðAbbott 1997Þand especially the second Chicago school “career studies,” which both noticed the clear,plan-like trajectory and also stressed actors’ negotiations of it ðsee Fine ½1995� for anoverviewÞ. This was perhaps most pronounced in studies of hospitals and doctor-patientinteractions, where recovery or death “plans” are often both doctors’ and patients’ cen-tral concern ðRoth 1963; Glaser and Strauss 1964, 1965Þ.
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to emerge, as Anderson tells it, people had to imagine themselves as occu-pying the same temporality, creating solidarities that gave them the feeling


that the same things were “happening to them,” on the same shared nationaltrajectory and the same landscape-like temporal horizons. One way they didthis was by reading the newspaper and thus engaging in a daily act of imag-ining themselves to be in a community of other citizens reading the paper.Through the construction of such “empty, homogeneous time” ðBenjamin1968; cf. Kelly 1998Þ, people could construct national identities, be draftedinto nationalist projects, and take for granted the new temporal landscapesof the modern nation-state.Our argument, however, contrasts with Durkheim’s early and influential

statement about any society’s need for its members to share a sense of time.Durkheimwrites that within a group or society, time is “an abstract and im-personal framework that contains not only our individual existence but alsothat of humanity. It is like an endless canvas onwhich all duration is spreadout before the mind’s eye and on which all possible events are located inrelation to points of reference that are fixed and specified. It is . . . time thatis conceived of objectively by all men of the same civilization” ð½1912� 1965,p. 10Þ.This poetic image is a good start, but it is too overarching and undiffer-

entiated. In a complex society, one kind of “time” operates in one way, butother kinds may not. Rather, there are different and competing ways to or-ganize and experience time: there are different narratives on the same tem-poral landscape, and sometimes there are different, even contending, land-scapeswithin one society. To say this is not to say that time is “our individualtime,” but that there is another possibility: that a complex society has mul-tiple, differentiated ways of coordinating action, so time rolls out differentlyin different kinds of relationships and interactions.Aswe develop further below, actorsmay be simultaneously oriented to an

eternal future, as a religious organization might be ðHervieu-Léger 2001Þ,to the long but not eternal life of a nation, to a short moment of consump-tion in a market relationship, or to the midlength budget cycles of interna-tional nongovernmental organizations ðNGOsÞ, for example. Far from apassively learned skill that people of each society simply enact, interactiondemands mastering subtle cultural skills, including the skills involved infuture-coordination; people cue each other in, so they know which past andwhich future to summon into their interaction in the present.

RELATIONS BETWEEN MODES OF FUTURE-COORDINATION

We have described different aspects of temporality that are necessary forfuture-coordination. Thus, people can have different immediate futures—protentions—at hand, partly depending on what “trajectory” is in play.

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These trajectories happen on plans and on temporal landscapes, which aresolidified, natural-feeling trajectories. Temporal landscapes, in turn, come


into being when people invoke and reinforce them, through protention.Even seemingly immutable temporal landscapes must be “done” and donot simply exist until people bring them into being.The rest of this article spells out the connections and possible disjunctures

among these different modes of future-coordination. Drawing both on ourownwork and on that of others, we show that although all of themodes con-stantly form the environment of action, they do not necessarily operate intandem and that any attempt to reduce the coordination of futures in inter-action to one or the other of these risks mischaracterizes the way people actand interact in everyday life.We begin by rejecting what we see as the two main existing theoretical

alternatives for thinking explicitly about the relation between differentmodes of future-coordination: a “reductivemodel” and a “complicitymodel.”We then present a first set of illustrations, showing varied relationships be-tween protention and trajectories. Our second set does the same with tem-poral landscapes and trajectories, and our third set of illustrations makes aparallel move regarding the relations between temporal landscapes andprotention.As we show throughout the sections and across cases, while people coor-

dinate futures in these three ways, the simultaneity does not necessarilymerge the three into a seamless, complicit unity. One dimension cannot bereduced to another “more basic” level. Rather, the interplay among thesedifferent modes can take different forms: they often fail to coordinate onewhile succeeding in coordinating another or even, as we will observe in afew of our examples below, succeed in coordinating one temporal mode atthe expense of their ability to coordinate action on another.Moreover, as weshow throughout the empirical cases, examining such discords and accordsin these three kinds of temporalization will often reveal to the observer onekind of mechanism ðGross 2009Þ for processes that are at the core of socialresearch—processes such as organizational failure, institutionalized classprivilege, and political decision making.

Two ðUltimately WrongÞ Syntheses
The most sustained theoretical accounts that take stock of more than onemode of future-coordination found in the literature opt for one of twomodelsof the relation: ðaÞ the reduction of temporal landscapes and trajectories toprotentional sequences or ðbÞ a theory of complicity, in which protentions,projects, and temporal landscapes work seamlessly in tandem.First, emphasizing protention, ethnomethodology treats future making
as if people create and recreate the socialworldwith every step they take, any

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interactional or conversational turn, and in this way constituting the worldin which we live. Thus, when analyzing action, ethnomethodologists’ lens


focuses on the continuously unfolding process and the here and now, as ifpeoplemake the roadonlybywalking it ðHeritage1984Þ. In thatview, trajec-tories and temporal landscapes are created only through protention, everycall-and-response calibrated in interaction.This approach can be seen as a “protentional” reduction in that it erases

any notion of culture. It opposes any attempt to interpret protention throughculturally shared narratives ðor temporal landscapes, for that matterÞ. Ittreats actors’ narratives only as outcomes of the protentional and indexicalaspects of interaction. That is, it assumes that actors pay attention only towhat immediately came before, so they can figure out the relevance of anynew utterance. For this approach, trajectories exist, to the extent that theyare considered by the researchers at all, only as a by-product of people’s or-dinary method of interpretative utterances, in which every action includesactors’ rereading of only immediate past relevant utterances and their im-plications for immediate future orientations. Although, as we show in thefollowing, this insight captures important aspects of action, it is best usedin conjunction with an approach that also pays attention to longer temporalengagements ðsee Jerolmack 2009; Gibson 2011a, 2011bÞ. Used on its own,it is ultimately unsatisfying. This approach misses certain aspects of the or-ganization of futures because it is locked in the immediate situation—whatBourdieu ð1977, p. 81Þ termed the “occasionalist illusion.”In contrast to this reduction of all future-coordination to a by-product of

protention, Bourdieu’s analysis aims to connect multiple forms of futuremaking. Thus, he claimed that one crucial effect of colonialism on Algeriansociety, and especially on the poorest Algerians of the “subproletariat,” wasthat their protentions came unhinged from their social conditions ðBourdieu1963, 1973, 2000Þ. As their immediate social expectations became irrelevant,their lives became “a game of chance.” Any “coherent vision of the future”vaporized, and their ability to imagine or enact intentional projects vanishedðBourdieu 2000, p. 221Þ. As the entire structure of their temporal landscape,and especially their possible plans, disintegrated, peasants were unable toanticipate the moment-by-moment future of their lives; this then affectedtheir ability to imagine a narrative or a project that would “fit” the actualsocial conditions in which they lived. Suspended in time, colonized Algeri-ans oscillated between unrealistic fantasies about an unattainable futureand complete passivity.Bourdieu’s vision of the relation among temporal landscapes, protentions,

and trajectories ðespecially, for Bourdieu, in the form of willed, volitionalprojectsÞ is one of complicity: they all resonate together, each amplifying theother. Actors who occupy different positions in a social field “do” them dif-

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ferently, and taken together, the complicit arrangement overwhelmingly re-produces long-term inequalities. Bourdieu’s habitus aims precisely to give


this complicity a name; his habitus is the generative principle that allowspeople to make the right move in a game—to act strategically and con-struct their own projects within the bounds of a class- and status-based setof dispositions. Plans ðwhat people “like us” can, or cannot, expect of lifeÞand protentions are thus tied together, in Bourdieu’s image, with people’sprojects being the strategic games they play on the landscape that they as-sume to be underfoot.The assumption of complicity among protention, project, and temporal

landscape also appears in thework of Schutz ð1967, pp. 57–63Þ.While Bour-dieu treats society as fractured along lines of class, status, and field posi-tions, Schutz, in contrast, treats the entire “society” as relatively coherent.Both, however, assume close resonance among different modes of future-anticipation. In everyday action, Schutz and Bourdieu imply, anticipationsfit together almost seamlessly, so if one of the modes somehow disintegrates,actors are thrown into disarray in all the other modes.5

Showing the connections between different aspects of future-coordinationis crucial for understanding how people act together, but we think thatSchutz and Bourdieu assume far too much coherence. Their images of tightcomplicity miss crucial aspects of ordinary anticipation and thus give cul-tural determinants far too much power over interaction. In this way, theyface the inverse problem of that of ethnomethodologists: instead of treatingeverything as an improvisation, Schutz and Bourdieu treat everything asrepetition.Generative and important as Bourdieu’s and Schutz’s formulations are,

neither can account for the complexity of actual interaction. In the follow-ing, we use empirical cases to develop a theoretical framework that reflectsthe intricacy of future-coordination. Researchers need an approach that willrecognize themultiple futures that are always in play. Itmust also showhowpeople perform each mode of future-coordination and how these modes re-late to one another in interaction: sometimes complicit, sometimes explicitlyclashing, and sometimes feeling aligned enough for actors to keep going, de-spite their actual mismatch.

5These different notions of coordinating temporality force us to confront, in another guise,
the problem of “culture in interaction.” Eliasoph and Lichterman ð2003Þ argue that stud-ies of “culture” tend to ignore interaction, while studies of interaction tend tominimize thestability of cultural orientations, and that researchers should treat both stable cultural rep-resentations and the typical patterns of improvising on them that people routinely employin interaction. In their treatments of temporality, each approach we discuss—the ethno-methodological ðand conversation analyticÞ, Bourdieusian, or Schutzian—replicates itstypical method of disconnecting culture and interaction.
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Protentions and Trajectories


Perhaps the most visible interplay of different modes of future-making oc-curs when people simultaneously coordinate protentions and trajectories.After all, any project, as well as any cultural narrative,must be “done” on thelevel of protention. The close connection between these modes makes it se-ductive to assume that either one can be reduced to another, or that they arecomplicit in sustaining everyday life. That everyday interaction is not soneat, however, was not lost on social theorists who otherwise assumed com-plicity. Thus, for Bourdieu, these modes can, and often do, clash in interac-tion.However, Bourdieu notices these clashes onlywhen people who occupydifferent social positions interact; even though for each actor the differentmodes of anticipation are still complicit, the interaction may fail. Alterna-tively, the world around us may change faster than does our habitus, inwhich case, our habitus simply does not match present conditions ðwhatBourdieu ½e.g., 1977� termed hysteresis or, more picturesquely, the Don Qui-xote effectÞ.Yet as we show in the examples below, in everyday interaction people

navigate a multiplicity of possible trajectories even within the horizon oftheir social space, which itself may be far from unified ðsee, e.g., Lahire 2003Þ.People constantly calibrate multiple expectations of long-term trajectories totheir immediate expectations and often reassess and recalibrate both. More-over, there is also no direct relation among actors’ coordination of trajectories,their coordination of protentions, and the overall success of the interaction.Rather than expecting the smooth operation of tightly interlocked dimensions,then, we expect people to choreograph these modes of future-coordination inways that may often seem effortless but that always require skill and maysometimes be quite fraught.To begin fleshing out this aspect of future-coordination, we can turn to

Tavory’s ð2009Þ study of flirtation. As this study shows, successful flirta-tion, as a form of interaction, depends on the ability of interactants to freezethe trajectory of interaction, purposely leaving the trajectory of their rela-tionship underdefined. Consider the following interaction:

In a crowded bar, two women in their early 20s are sitting together across thecounter, drinking beers and talking. In the pauses between bouts of conversa-tion, they look around at others in the bar, seemingly bored. After awhile, amansitting on the right of one of them turns to her, “Always crowded on Thursdays,isn’t it?” They start talking, mostly about the bar itself, how it became too pop-ular for its own good, and how it used to be before. Throughout the conversa-tion the man intermittently touches the women’s hand or shoulder, stressing hiswords by pressing it, and at one point, they continue talking while lightly hold-ing hands for a few seconds. After about tenminutes, the girl’s friend says some-thing to her, and she tells the man she has to leave. “Have to go. See you around?”she says, looking into his eyes and raising her chin with a little smile. The man re-turns a smile, “Hope so.” ðPp. 59–60Þ

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As in Simmel’s classical account ð½1911� 1984Þ, flirtation leaves a certain po-tentiality open by giving opposite messages at once. On the one hand, the


couple seem to be chatting as two strangers would. On the other hand,throughout their conversation, they lightly touch, even holding hands fora few seconds. Focusing on the temporal aspect of the interaction helps usto see people’s everyday methods of interweaving and counterpoising mul-tiple layers of closeness and distance. The ambiguity and tension built intoflirtation derive precisely from its temporal choreography. On the one hand,the actors are keeping their position vis-à-vis each other as it was before—ascolleagues, students in the same program, or strangers who just met. Theflirtation, however, entails practices and schemas taken from a differentframe: a potential future in which the two people are already engaged in aromantic, or sexualized, relationship. For the flirtation to continue, bothparties must constantly negotiate these temporalities simultaneously, with-out appearing to choose between them. They achieve ambiguity throughcareful management of temporalities in interaction. Flirtatious actors haveto know how to keep two mismatched futures in play at once.This kind of interaction, in which people manage multiple trajectories on

a protentional level, has been termed ðthough using the language of “roles”rather than of temporalityÞ “local action” by Eric Leifer ð1988Þ. He observesthat everyday interaction includes myriadmoments in which actors interac-tionally play with more than one role, and the allure of the interaction isprecisely this ambiguity. Flirtation, in this regard, is only a specific instanceof a wider form of action and interaction, in which multiple trajectories areheld in abeyance through protentional skills.Our focus on temporality examines “local action” by highlighting the re-

lation between protention and trajectories. People occupy, or potentially oc-cupy, multiple membership categorizations, so they often juggle multiplepossible trajectories simultaneously. Through the immediate futures of pro-tention, they know how tomove a trajectory forward but also how to hold itin abeyance. As they protentionally improvise their next move, they implic-itly need to know which move would “actualize” a trajectory: asking some-one for a date, for example, irrevocably defines the interaction, though notits outcome.Flirtation and local action illustrate three interrelated points. First, enter-

ing a trajectory ðand making any subsequent move within itÞ is an interac-tional accomplishment. Tomake a trajectory relevant in a situation, peoplehave to do something. Second, it takes even greater interactional skill toavoid entering a trajectory; a trajectory is not an extraneous add-on to ev-eryday interaction but helps constitute it, unless people do something activeto prevent each other from entering one.Third, and most important for our purposes here, by paying attention to

the minute details of interaction, we can start disentangling the ways in

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which protention and trajectory knit together and come apart. Coordinat-ing futures involves complex—and deeply cultural—competencies on the


level of protention. By saying that they are “cultural,”we mean that peopledo not create or learn them in the moment alone, but that they recognize thepatterns from previous interactions that they consider “similar.” Actors im-plicitly have to know how to perform ðor avoidÞ practices that will actualizea shift from one situation to another, from one narrative position to another,from one definition of a relationship to another. We are not saying that ac-tors explicitly knowwhere they are heading on a trajectory ðthough they of-ten do, or at least imagine they doÞ, but that they implicitly knowwhich pro-tentional practices actualize a shift of a given social interaction. They haveto know how to calibrate their position toward the immediate future at anygiven moment of the interaction, and they do this in relation to their narra-tives of a longer-term future; in the flirtation cases, the relation is one of ac-tive avoidance of any longer-term future.Cases that are theorized as “local action,” however, still present a rela-

tively high level of coordination between actors as they coconstruct proten-tions and trajectories by being either implicitly invoked or implicitly heldat bay. But we argue that there are other possible ways inwhich protentionsand trajectories stitch together or come undone. As Goode ð1994Þ hasshown in the case of interactions between deaf and nondeaf people and asJerolmack ð2009, 2013Þ recently argued in the case of animal-human inter-action, actors who see themselves on very different trajectories may, none-theless, appear to be going about their business as if they share the samenarrative trajectory. Thus, as Jerolmack shows, people feeding pigeons inthe park had elaborate stories about the pigeons coming because theywanted companionship when they came to feed. Although we cannot knowwhat projects the pigeons were actually performing, it is not likely that theywere looking for friendship. However, as long as people and pigeons canboth move along the interaction—in protentional terms—the question ofwhether they are, or are not, actually on the same trajectory is largely con-cealed. Like many human interactions, we may think we are practicing thesame trajectory while actually being on very different ones—just as long asthe protentionmake sense for both trajectories. In otherwords, multiple tra-jectories can coexist in interaction as long as both actors can productivelyðmisÞunderstand each other’s projects.Taking the disjuncture between protentions and trajectories another

step forward, our third illustration comes from a recent series of studies ofthe Cuban nuclear missile crisis. David Gibson ð2011a, 2011bÞ shows notonly how protentions and trajectories have to be coordinated separatelyfrom one another in interaction but how—in certain situations—coordi-nating on the protentional level may actually obstruct the trajectories that

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actors want to envision. Using audio recordings of the high-level Americancommittee that discussed how to react to Soviet nuclear missile bases un-


der construction in Cuba, Gibson shows how negotiators attended mostlyto what the person before them said, which is a typical way to coordi-nate protentions in interaction ðsee Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977;Schegloff 1992Þ. The problem was that when everyone paid attention towhat the last person said, they collectively ended up neglecting to explorepossible narrative outcomes, even though the people in the room all had atleast a passing interest in exploring all possible scenarios to avert a nuclearholocaust. Despite the crisis’s happy ending, protentional coordination un-dermined actors’ capacity to imagine varied, specific trajectories, but notbecause of any “complicity” between protentions and trajectories. On thecontrary, different competencies are needed to coordinate these differentmodes of future making: while protentional skills require actors to treat thelast turn of interaction as the most relevant unit, narrative skills may re-quire them to ignore the last turn of interaction if wewant to explore all pos-sible futures.In summary, then, although any trajectory is “done” through proten-

tions, it would be a mistake to reduce one to the other or to assume thatthey work only when they are complicit with one another. These casesshowcase not just the effort and skill it takes to coordinate trajectories andprotentions but also the ways in which this effort can fail or fall short:when people coordinate protentionally without coordinating the projectsthey are on ðor only assuming that they have coordinated them, as whenthe other actor is like a pigeon whose projects can easily be imputed with-out rebuttalÞ or when, dramatically, the coordination of protention actuallyhinders actors from entertaining varied trajectories, as in the Cuban mis-sile crisis.The last two cases give us an important clue not only for how the coor-

dination of protentions and trajectories can diverge but also for why thisis so. Although protentions take place on a larger temporal trajectory andlandscape, part of what is coordinated on a protentional level is the smooth-ness of the interaction itself. As Goffman ðe.g., 1959, 1971Þ, Garfinkel ð1967Þ,and conversation analysts ðe.g., Schegloff et al. 1977; Schegloff 1992Þ clearlyarticulate, a specific interaction is not only a part of a larger swath of actionbut an end unto itself. People are invested in keeping the interaction goingsmoothly and often go to great lengths, exhibiting extreme deference, for ex-ample, to ensure it will succeed ðsee also Rawls 1987Þ. This means that whatactors coordinate on a protentional dimension and what they coordinate interms of their trajectories are not always the same kind of thing. The micro-coordination of protentional action may actually blind actors to what wouldotherwise be obvious miscoordinations of their trajectories.

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Plans, Temporal Landscapes, and Trajectories


Much like the relation between trajectories and protentions, the relation be-tween naturalized plans, temporal landscapes, and trajectories reveals thatalthough they are tightly tied to each other in many situations, they may,and often do, come unthreaded.People are usually located on more than one naturalized plan, on more

than one temporal landscape. Although they may share the structure of theweek or the Gregorian calendar ðsee Zerubavel 1977, 1989, 2003Þ, there area plethora of temporal landscapes and plans that coexist within that frame-work—clock time, family time, the long, naturalized temporal horizons of anation, or theNGO’s relatively rapid budget cycle. This, as we show, comesto mean that people can coordinate trajectories on different landscapes aslong as the action is understandable on both landscapes. To return to Ab-bott’s musical metaphor, two very different songs can contain the samefive-note progression. These five notes can make sense in both songs as longas the part somehow makes sense within the whole in each song.After showing how people make and remake narrative trajectories in re-

lation to changes in temporal landscapes, we present two illustrations thatparallel the cases of human-pigeon interaction and the Cubanmissile crisis:Interaction in large NGOs shows us how people can seemingly coordinatetheir temporal landscapes while being embedded in very different ones, justas long as the trajectories they coconstruct make sense in both temporallandscapes. Next, the case of infrastructural construction in the PalestinianGaza Strip in the mid-20th century shows how one kind of trajectory can,inadvertently, end up bringing about a temporal landscape that actors hadtaken pains to avoid.As a bridge to the ways trajectories and temporal landscapes are con-

nected, we revisit E. P. Thompson’s ð1967Þ description of the arduous anddisarticulated process of English workers’ lurching into the temporal land-scape of “industrial capitalism.” The process of early industrialization thatThompson describes allows us to appreciate two points. First, since temporallandscapes feel natural to people, changing them is a massive feat that re-quires steadily sanding away the narratives on all fronts—technology, reli-gion, work, recreation, education, as well as people’s embodied relation topleasure and pain. Such a shift required time, repetition, and often violentcoercion from industrialists. Even by the early 1800s, workers came to worklate, left early, took Mondays off altogether, and monkeyed with the clocks.As one major industrialist complained, workers “reckon by clocks going thefastest” when they left work and “by clocks going too slow” when they ar-rived ðp. 82Þ. Even the embodied protentions of seemingly natural bodilyrhythms had to change. By age 6 or 7, workers’ children should become, inthe words of a 1772 proponent of a newly regimented, exigent, and exhaust-

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ing school schedule, “habituated, not to say naturalized, to labour and fa-tigue” ðp. 84Þ.


Second,Thompson’s essay shows howa transition to a new landscape canbe partly fostered by a transition in narratives. As Thompson writes, “in thefirst stage, we find simple resistance. But, in the next stage, as the new time-discipline is imposed, so the workers begin to fight, not against time, butabout it” ð1967, p. 85Þ. To put it in our terms, workers at the dawn of theindustrial era fought against the institutionalization of this new temporallandscape, but, after a while, they stopped fighting against the new land-scape and started fighting instead for a better trajectory within the newlandscape. They fought, for example, for a shorter workweek and for moreleisure time rather than fighting against the time clock itself. Thus, payingattention to the fraught, sometimes disjunctive, relationship between land-scapes and narratives reveals important mechanisms that trigger large-scale historical changes.Temporal landscapes and trajectories do relate to one another, then, but

in ways that are far from being comfortably “nested.” They may grate oneach other, and making them feel neatly “complicit” is an arduous achieve-ment. Crafting a new temporal landscape, in Thompson’s case, required co-ercion, and the trajectories people coordinated among themselves laggedbehind a transformation of a hegemonic temporal landscape.And like the transformations in the earlier incarnations of modernity

that Thompson describes, late modernity also includes rough, grating mis-matches between modes of future-coordination. Theorists describe the cur-rent era as one of ever-quickening transformations in temporal landscapes—sudden avalanches and earthquakes, in addition to routine, steady, slowerosion. Concepts such as “liquid modernity,” “reflexive modernity,” and the“risk society” thus hold that our society has, built into its very structure, anunprecedented level of instability and insecurity. A traditional society, asGiddens ð1991, p. 47Þ puts it, “orders time in a manner which restricts theopenness of counterfactual futures.”Giddens is careful to note that people insuch societies could imagine alternative futures. However, they presumedthat an overarching order restricted and organized those futures. In contrast,late modernity makes extreme demands for people to constantly readjusttheir expectations. There is the temporary job and the constant demand tobe ready to retool for the next job ðEhrenreich 2005; McGee 2005Þ. We haveto be prepared to redo our expectations when we encounter the short-livedmarriage ðBeck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995; Hackstaff 1999Þ. We adjust toan ephemeral built environment ðKlein 1997Þ and ever-changing fashionsand technologies ðHarvey 1990Þ.Although Karl Marx famously characterized modernity itself as an era

in which “all that is solid melts into air” ð½1848� 2000, p. 475; see also Ber-

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man 1982Þ, late modernity further destabilizes naturalized futures. Theyseem to lose their aura of inevitability—precisely what made them feel like


“landscapes” in the first place. Theorists of late modernity describe the newtemporal landscape as shifting and untrustworthy. Giddens ð1991Þ, Beckð1992Þ, and Bauman ð2000Þ all assert that people in late modernity mustcome to terms with more and more uncertainty; they recognize that mas-sive crises are always looming—what Beck and Giddens term “the risk so-ciety”—and they thus must constantly orient themselves toward multiplepossible futures. This, in turn, changes their implicit understanding of thenature of trajectories themselves. As the inevitability of naturalized planserodes, people start to construct trajectories as if they are only contingent,short-term, willed projects rather than long-term and inevitable plans.The work of Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim ðBeck and Beck-Gernsheim

1995; Beck-Gernsheim 1999Þ illustrates this process. Taking the case of ro-mantic love and marriage, Beck-Gernsheim shows how marriage in West-ern Europe ceased to be considered what we would call a naturalized plan.Marriage was once a near inevitability, and its final temporal horizon wasconsidered natural as well: “till death do us part.” In late modernity, how-ever, love relationships and marriages became individual projects that peo-ple conceive of, and experience, as ongoing achievements rather than aself-evident fact of life. The “normal chaos of love” that Beck-Gernsheimdescribes is the outcome of the disintegration of modern naturalized plans.This landscape of “family time” stopped feeling naturally given, and a newway of “doing relationships” ensued. Now, people must constantly “work at”a relationship, and its possible end is always looming. On the current land-scape, even people who have had a long-term stable marriage comment withgreat surprise to an interviewer about how remarkable it is that the marriagehas not fallen apart ðHackstaff 1999Þ.Theorists of the risk society and of late modernity more broadly thus con-

verge on the idea that the denaturalization of plans gives rise to a new wayof forming projects. It is not, as Bourdieu’s study of Algeria claimed, thatnarratives on a disintegrated temporal landscape become detached fromreality so that people cannot make sense of their lives and the trajectoriesthey can expect. Rather, the denaturalization of plans and temporal land-scapes changed the quality of trajectories. When the landscape startsbreaking down and paths on it start changing shape underfoot, many peo-ple start to glorify individual projects at the expense of well-trodden plans.This all shows two more reasons for considering Bourdieu’s model to be

unsatisfactory. As we have already noted, people have always placed them-selves onmultiple temporal landscapes simultaneously. On this multiplicityof temporal landscapes and trajectories, people can, nevertheless, imaginethat their temporal landscapes are compatible with one another, as long asthe narratives and projects they construct work on both. On the other hand,

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as in Gibson’s analysis of the Cuban missile crisis in the last section, this po-tential disarticulationmay sometimesmean thatwhen the actors do the com-


plexwork of coordinating trajectories onmore than one landscape, the resultmight be a temporal landscape that none of the actors actually wanted tobring into being—an “accidental symphony.”Continuously mismatched—but seemingly coordinated—trajectories are

common, for example, in the seams among the varied temporal landscapesthat make up the world of global aid. International NGO donors operate ona temporal landscape that involves the World Bank’s, International Mon-etary Fund’s, and fellow international NGOs’medium-term planning andbudget cycles ðsee Sampson 1996; Elyachar 2005; Krause 2009; Swidler andWatkins 2009Þ. On the one hand, this seems to be, from actors’ perspective,a relatively short-term temporal landscape, operating according to annualcycles and allocating funds to aid projects that can bear some visible fruitquarterly. On the other hand, NGOs attempt to “build capabilities” and“teach a man to fish” ðSwidler and Watkins 2009Þ on a longer-term basisrather than provide locals with their immediate needs. Here, there is an im-plicit assumption about a longer temporal horizon—one in which peoplecan assume that taking years to learn skills will pay off in the long run be-cause there will be a stable temporal landscape on which to operate.In fact, local actors’ temporal landscape is often much more precarious

than that, and their methods of constructing trajectories develop in relationto this unsteady ground. When plans unfold on a landscape of a rapidlychanging economy, weak and unstable state, and NGOs’ newest develop-ment fad ðAIDS one year, mosquito netting the next, global warming thethird, e.g.Þ, individual projects tend to replace natural-feeling plans.6

Thus, a person who aspires to move up the social hierarchy and is savvyenough to secure funds from foreign NGOs is operating on two temporallandscapes at once, and the same trajectories might have different meaningson the different landscapes ðSampson 1996; Swidler and Watkins 2009Þ.These aspiring elites need the immediate fruits of the NGO project, in theform of daily per diems on which they depend for a living. They also wantaccess to training and education programs that they hopewill propel them to“bright futures” ðFrye 2012Þ. The temporal landscapes of NGOs and of theaspiring elites seem to align when the same short-term trajectories are desir-able on both landscapes. Certification programs, for example, let local aspir-ing elites prepare for a precarious future by acquiring a skill that they canput on their vitas when they compete for elusive upward mobility. Running

6In this sense, these actors operate in a temporal landscape similar to that described as
defining Western late modernity. While the reasons for the crumbling of naturalizedplans and temporal landscapes may be different, the effect—the rise in importance of in-dividual projects—may be actually all the more powerful in these contexts.
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a certificate program also lets the NGO show a tangible short-term result:participants got certificates.


When the aspiring elites build up their CVs or propose projects that per-fectly alignwithNGOs’mission statements, it is not that they are “cheating”the NGO or that they do not care for, or believe in, the issues for which theyrequested funds. Both while on the job and in retrospect, local NGO work-ers and training recipients are usually adamant about the project’s impor-tance—evenwhen the project is discontinued and seems to produce few tan-gible results. And yet, discordant temporal landscapes might explain manyof the endemic failures of NGO work ðsee, e.g., Pritchett, Woolcock, andAndrews 2010; Barron, Woolcock, and Diprose 2011Þ. During the term ofthe NGO intervention, the projects of NGOs and of local actors align: tem-poral landscapes can seem to be successfully superimposed and actors canwork together in a seamless manner. But when the careers of the aspiringelites who receive the funds take them elsewhere, when NGOs change theirfocus, or when political instability threatens to undermine the possibilitiesfor mobility, the prediction of “sustainability” and “capacity building” fails.Although temporal landscapes seem to be shared when the varied partiesenact their own distinct trajectories, this alignment is precarious.Our last illustration of tensions between narratives, trajectories, and tem-

poral landscapes literally involves the physical landscape. At first, Gaza wassupposed to be a temporary refugee camp. In Ilana Feldman’s ð2008Þ depic-tion ofmid-20th-centuryGaza, we see that this early narrative about its tem-porary, stateless nature has grown harder and harder to uphold, becauseGaza has become, over the decades, an entity that looks and acts a lot likea state. By 1967, it ended up doing much of what states normally do: buildwater projects and highways and create a social studies curriculum to pre-pare future citizens. But it is a state-like entity that was, for several decades,considered provisional and temporary. Administrators and leaders neithersaw, nor wanted to see, Gaza as a state.Authorities thus had to enact a temporal hide-and-seek game, building

relatively permanent structures without making any claims about a perma-nent set of social relations that would make the permanent structures nec-essary. Creating textbooks that would educate future citizens for Gazan cit-izenship illustrates this internal contradiction: “When a delegation from theArab League visited Gaza in 1953, the mayor took the opportunity to insistthat students in Gaza needed to be educated in the history and geography ofPalestine and that they needed textbooks that could offer this education . . .but designing wholly local texts would have been difficult given that, asthe committee also recognized, ‘the current situation in Gaza is a provi-sional one, subject to many changes’” ðFeldman 2008, p. 213Þ.Building waterworks illustrates a different kind of temporal leapfrog

problem between trajectory and landscape. In 1948, following Israel’s inde-

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pendence war, Gaza’s administration resisted connecting the camp’s tem-porary waterworks to permanent networks, which “might signal an accep-


tance of permanent displacement” ðp. 170Þ. The problem was that no mat-ter how temporary the landscape was supposed to be, aid agencies had toprovide water and other necessities to the population. While administra-tors delayed long-term planning for several decades, pipes, pumps, andwells eventually solidified—literally—into “structures.” The projects wererepeated so many times, they ended up creating a physical landscape thatundermined the “temporary” image that the narrative continued to antici-pate.Thus, it is not only that narrative trajectories happen “on” landscapes, but

that a pattern of action—a set of short-term trajectories in the Gazan water-works case—may smuggle onto the landscape implicit assumptions about afuture. These assumptions, in turn, may well contradict people’s professedassumptions about their temporal landscape. In this case, accepting Gaza’slong-term location could seem like an acceptance of Palestinian defeat. Buteven when actors try to avoid this specific temporal landscape, the accretionof projects ends up creating the giant, permanent-looking edifice that looksand acts like what we call “a state.” Administrators took myriad tiny steps,constructing a series of mostly provisional projects that assumed and finallysolidified over time into established and naturalized routines.As with the relationship between trajectories and protentions, temporal

landscapes and the trajectories people construct within them cannot be seenas complicit, nor can they be reduced to one or the other. Rather than neatlynested levels of analysis, there are different possible permutations of tempo-ral landscapes and patterned trajectories. Our examples showed three: theexamples of late modernity showed that the denaturalization of plans canmake projects more central; the fate of NGOs and their local aid recipientsshowed that actors can juggle multiple temporal landscapes at once; and,third, the Gaza example shows that temporal landscapes might “happen”even when people try to avoid them, as certain projects implicitly assumea temporality that no one actually seems to want to put in place.

Temporal Landscapes and Protention

Our last set of illustrations shows the interplay of protentions and temporallandscapes that occurs either when actors are located on different temporallandscapes from one another or when they are not sure what temporal land-scape is underfoot—as in moments of sudden historical transformation.This section brings together the theoretical conclusions of the previous sec-tions to emphasize one last point: examining the relation among all threemodes of future-coordination in interaction—temporal landscapes, trajec-tories, and protentions—illuminates some key mechanisms of the fraught

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dynamics between classes or generations, political processes, and otherlarge-scale social questions.


As the cases of “late modernity,” the “risk society,” and the industrial rev-olution ðat least in Thompson’s portraitÞ make clear, changes in temporallandscapes affect actors’ protentions. Nineteenth-century proletarian chil-dren start to expect the kinds of pain and fatigue that go with regimentedlabor; late modern lovers start to expect their relationship to be an ongoingachievement that has to be constantly worked at. But in order to talk abouthow people coordinate protentions in such cases, a more sustained and in-teractional approach than the one implemented in the studies of late moder-nity is necessary.One example that disentangles the relationship among the different di-

mensions of future making in interaction can be seen in an ethnographythat traced two different sets of youth volunteers involved in civic projectsin the United States ðEliasoph 2011Þ. One set of volunteers came from “pre-vention programs” for “at-risk youths”; the others were college bound andwere involved in volunteer projects partly to fill up their CVs for their up-coming college applications.The two categories of youth volunteers worked together on civic projects

in an organization that brought them together nominally as equals. But thetwo sets of youthswere riding two different naturalized plans that happenedto cross paths during the short time trajectories of civic engagement projects.When government and nonprofit money came to the civic engagement proj-ects in the form of “prevention programs” for “at-risk youths,” those low-income, “minority” youthmemberswere explicitly being envisioned on aplanaimed at preventing the anticipated future disasters, such as drug abuse,crime, and teen pregnancy, that statistics predict for them. In contrast, youthvolunteers who were not disadvantaged also came with a naturalized planunderfoot. They joined partly as a way of boosting future chances—of get-ting into college, the obvious “next step” in their lives. Of course, many par-ticipants in both categories also genuinely wanted to do volunteer work tohelp others, but the two different plans meant that members sometimesclashed in interaction. Sometimes they understood that these clashes relatedto their “background,” but sometimes they simply found the discrepanciespuzzling. The discrepancies make sense when we understand that eachparty’s trajectory is on a larger temporal landscape, just asmusical sequencesacquire their meanings from the symphony as a whole.Thus, for example, the difference in naturalized plans sometimes led to ar-

guments and friction regarding how volunteers should spend money. Manyof the disadvantaged volunteers assumed that spending money on the vol-unteers themselves—for parties or get-togethers—was fine, even if the vol-unteer groups never helped anyone but the youth volunteers themselves.

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Spending money on themselves, however, often seemed unacceptable forcollege-bound volunteers.


After one volunteer event, a disadvantaged girl, Teeyen, sat listening toa nondisadvantaged boy, VJ, complain:

VJ: Only four people showed up! Jenny and Joey ½two “nondisadvantaged”volunteers� came for about a half an hour yesterday. They said theywere gonnacome from 11–3 but they left at about 11:30! Then todaywewere the only ones.People say they’re interested but then they don’t sign up to come.

Teeyen: It’s like the community service project at school. People come to meet-ings but no one signs up to do any of the projects.

VJ: It should be like Honors Society—You have to do three community serviceprojects a semester and if you’re absent three times, you’re out. People want tojust be able to say they were ½in our organization� for their vita. We got all thismoney—$2,000. How are we gonna spend it? What about buying books andtoys for kids in the hospital, and distributing them? Would that be a way tospend it?

Teeyen: T-shirts? Some of it is going for t-shirts. But that’s a lot of t-shirts. Ithought the money was for giving ourselves parties and doing things for our-selves, to reward ourselves for doing things in the community.

VJ: Yeah, but that’s still a lot of money and besides, we haven’t done anythingin the community yet.

Fuming against his fellow college-bound youths, VJ complains about vol-unteers who come “for their vita,” trying to forge a shared project with an-other volunteer. Although Teeyen plays along, the interaction comes closeto breaking down. They are united against those college-bound participantswho do nothing, but it still makes sense to Teeyen that some youth volun-teers use volunteering to give themselves a boost, to “reward ourselves.”This, however, is precisely what VJ thought volunteering is not about. Itshould, he argues, be like an “honors society,” where people have to workhard, and show it, in order to earn their reward; the effort, should, in hismind, be directed outward, to “the community,” not inward, toward thegroup members themselves. In this situation, they manage to coordinatetheir protentions well enough to keep the interaction going, and they mightnot even perceive a tension in the interaction. And yet, much protentional“repair work” is necessary for each implicitly to ignore the other’s visionof volunteering.This implicit smoothing over of the interaction was sometimes explicit.

For some interactions to work, everyone had to know that it was acceptableand even good when disadvantaged youths came to meeting after meetingand said nothing but only fiddled with the food they had brought, talked,squirmed, or giggled. As one disadvantaged youth volunteer said about

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himself, when a reporter at a “youth-led” event asked him about his mo-tives for volunteering at the event, “I’m involved instead of being out on


the streets or instead of taking drugs or doing something illegal.” He cor-rectly understood that the organizers of these programs assumed thatkeeping a disadvantaged youth volunteer like him in a meeting was itselfa triumph.Thus, participants had to know that it was okay for those volunteers not

to participate in decision making, whereas the college-bound youths weresupposed to participate. Usually, the volunteers themselves seemed to knowthe difference, knowing that implicitly typifying ðSchutz 1967Þ the volun-teers as “disadvantaged”meant theywere not to be reproached. “They”werenot expected to do the things that “we” the college-bound volunteers were.Once in a great while did college-bound youths blow up in frustration at allthe wiggling, joking, and talking, not understanding the unspoken differ-ence in the naturalized plans envisioned for the two sets of youths.As others have shown, neoliberal programs tend to erase any acknowl-

edgement of the very inequality that brought them into being in the firstplace ðCruikshank 1999; Haney 2010Þ. We agree, and we add to it by show-ing how temporal mechanisms work to reproduce this neoliberal-style in-equality. The relation betweenmismatched naturalized plans, shared trajec-tories, and the ways in which certain protentions make ðand do not makeÞsense in both shows a way in which neoliberal projects reflect and create in-equalities. Even if the actors manage, protentionally, to smooth over mostfailures, analyzing their interaction through the prism of the coordination ofdifferent modes of future making clarifies when, how, and ultimately whytheir interactions become strained when they do.Finally, sometimes, especially in dramatic moments of historical change,

actors are not sure what temporal landscape they are on. Facing the un-formed, floating, “inchoate” aspects of events ðGreimas 1987Þ, they have to“puzzle out” the potential new temporal landscape together ðsee Winship2006; Wagner-Pacifici 2010Þ, collectively reading clues into their environ-ment or, in amuch darker scenario, sometimes bringing into being preciselythe temporal landscape they were trying to avoid.In an analysis of “the restlessness of events,” Robin Wagner-Pacifici

ð2010Þ argues that to understand how people piece together a sense of newor unsettling events, we should pay attention to how they construct perfor-mative, demonstrative, and representational features of the world aroundthem. This semiotic approach begins to disentangle the elements that peopleuse in order to puzzle out a changing world. From a perspective of future-coordination, it forces us to appreciate that in certain “eventful” situations,people have to piece together a new temporal landscape and, alongside it,a new structure ðe.g., political or economicÞ that may give rise to new pos-

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sible trajectories, and in which even the protentions of everyday life mustbe recalibrated. In these historical moments, people do not experience tem-


poral landscapes as “simply there.” The period following 9/11, Wagner-Pacifici argues, was precisely that kind of time. Some Americans felt theirentire world was collapsing before their eyes, and they needed to recon-struct an intelligible temporal landscape.When temporal landscapes crumble, people often fall back on their skills

at coordinating other dimensions of future making. A dramatic, terrible, se-ries of events that showcases suchmoments is analyzed byErmakoff ð2008Þ,using game theoretical models and minute historical detail to explain howthe German and French congresses democratically abdicated their power,allowing for the democratic rise of the Nazi dictatorship and of the Vichygovernment.Ermakoff’s work provides a rare glimpse into how people act when the

world around them is disintegrating,when the contours of taken-for-grantedtemporal landscapes crumble. In a poignant moment, the 1933German pol-iticians voted to abdicate constitutional powers. Even the Center Party Ger-man politicians voted for the abdication, despite their fears of a Nazi dicta-torship. Although many of them knew full well that their vote would be thelast nail in the coffin of German democracy, their vote was motivated notonly by a series of ðmisÞcalculations but by a respect for the procedures ofdemocracy and an attempt to “smooth over” the operations of the politicalbody. Thus, even the “rational calculations” of Center Party politiciansincluded a democratic “feel for the game”—protentions that allowed thedemocracyminded to continue to operate and tomake sense of their actions,evenwhen facing the disintegration of the temporal landscapes theywere in.The dark irony was that this protentional “smoothing over” and semira-

tional “feel for the political game”made Center Party politicians accessoriesto the destruction of any semblance of democracy. The Nazis, on the otherhand, saw full well that this vote would bring about a recalibration not onlyof the current political power but of the entire temporal landscape. Indeed,as Ermakoff notes, the Nazis termed the vote “the synchronization” ð2008,p. 23Þ, where the entire apparatus of the state was coordinated in relation tothe “eternal Reich.”This set of illustrations, as in other sections, is only the tip of an iceberg.

We could equally discuss the coordination of narratives and protentionswhen temporal landscapes dramatically fail, as is the case in millennialapocalyptic movements ðFestinger, Riecken, and Schachter 1956Þ; how“puzzling out” a new landscape occurs in other cases, such as following9/11 or the financial crisis of 2008; how when people try to shift temporallandscapes, their efforts might fail but still leave protentional traces in theirwake—such as linguistic changes in uses of the formal and informal “you”

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pronoun, reflecting the solidarities formed in the French and Russian revo-lutions ðBrown and Gilman 1960Þ. The permutations are endless.


But beyond this endless array of possibilities, these cases allow us tomake sense of a last aspect of divergent modes of future-coordination. Thecase of the youth volunteers shows that even when people misunderstandeach other by misperceiving the naturalized plans that the other presumesto be underfoot, the interaction can keep going through actors’ proten-tional skill. On the other hand, in “eventful” situations in which actors per-ceive the temporal landscape to be precarious, they often clutch at proten-tional straws that allow them to act in a way that seems meaningful. Andsometimes, when people rely on protention to give their interaction coher-ence, they end up bringing about precisely the temporal landscape they areattempting to avoid. Although these cases are different, then, they illustratesome of the specific mechanisms that make possible the reconstruction ofclass demarcations, political abdication, or other processes of interest to so-ciologists.

CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION

This article presented an approach for studying the coordination of futures.Building on kindred theories and studies of temporality and action, wemapped three different aspects of future making that actors need to coordi-nate in everyday life in order to make sense of action together. This does notmean that people have to agree on which future to hold in their imagina-tions or that theymust hold only one future constant for interaction towork.Quite the contrary. As we show, people are continuously performing andrecalibrating their futures and sometimes are not even sure which temporallandscapes they are located on. People need to coordinate their futures justenough to keep going, and in this process, disjunctures are the rule as muchas the exception.We outlined three modes that people regularly compose in order to coor-

dinate futures: protentions, trajectories, and temporal landscapes ðinclud-ingwhatwe called “naturalized plans”Þ. Our examples thenfleshed out someof the potential utility of examining the interplay among these differenttemporal modes. As a conclusion, we would like to spell out some directionsthat we have taken, highlighting the potential uses of this approach in fu-ture research.First, these three modes of future-coordination cannot be reduced to

some “basic” dimension; nor are they always complicitly coordinated in tan-dem. Inmany interactions, as our illustrationsmake clear, they do not easilyharmonize. This is so for a number of reasons, among which are the follow-ing: ðaÞ Actors could protentionally manage the smoothness of the interac-tion itself. The smoothness of the interaction, however, could be dissonant

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with the narratives or temporal landscapes that are in play. ðbÞ Actors cancoordinate a series of protentions that make sense with one another even if


they are located on different trajectories. Actors can coordinate trajectoriesðor protentionsÞ even if the trajectories, in turn, are actually located on dif-ferent temporal landscapes. Actors can do so, but only as long as the actioncan make sense on both trajectories ðor on both temporal landscapesÞ forthe duration of the interaction. ðcÞ Since temporal landscapes are natural-ized trajectories, they sometimes come into being as the unexpected conse-quences of actors’ more limited and purposive trajectories, even when theactors are actively trying to avoid such a temporal landscape. Trajectoriescan become institutionalized and naturalized, whether or not actors planfor them to become so.Our approach also assumes that people actively construct their trajecto-

ries and have tomaster complex cultural skills in order to coordinate futurestogether. Thus, second, the skills that actors use to actualize ðor avoidÞ nar-rative shifts that we developed in the cases of flirtation and youth volun-teers are instances of a more general category of cultural competencies thatresearchers could fruitfully locate in other times and places. Asking how tra-jectories are coordinated and how they make sense in relation to the othertwo modes of future-coordination may shed light on changes in meaningsin action rather than in lexical definitions. In this sense, readers can thinkabout our approach as a methodological incitation, suggesting that study-ing everyday future-coordination may give researchers a more precise wayof connecting interaction to large-scale historical transformations.Third, we make the case that through looking at the ways in which mis-

matched trajectories, plans, and protentional skills are put into play, wecan show some of the mechanisms through which “class privilege,” “insti-tutional failure,” or “political abdication” works. In this sense, this articlecan be read as specifying a family of mechanisms through which other the-oretical objects are constructed. Like other pragmatists interested in socialmechanisms ðsee Joas 1996; Gross 2009Þ, we try to move away from theo-retical categories that “black box” social processes by labeling them ðas“racism” or “class privilege,” e.g.Þ rather than explaining how they arise ineveryday interaction. A focus on future-coordination can be a useful way ofspecifying the “how” of interactional failures and successes that crystallizebroader categories such as “class,” “inequality,” and “solidarity.”Relatedly, focusing on future-coordination can specify and qualify insti-

tutional and macrosocial aspects of social life. Using this approach, re-searchers can observe actors’ coordination of their temporal horizons anduse those observations to make grounded claims about how macroforcesshape, and are shaped by, actors’ lives. Subtle, everyday acts of temporalcoordination are necessary, yet rarely examined, examples of mechanismsthat link face-to-face interaction to broader patterns. Moreover, by describ-

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ing howpeople often recalibratemultiple future orientations in everyday in-teraction, we can show not just how macroforces invite people to imagine


different futures in a specific historical moment but how, in interaction, peo-ple negotiate those futures, tinkering andmaking sense of them to make thesituation “work.”But beyond all of these considerations, future-coordination is important

in its own right. We spend much of our lives orienting ourselves towards afuture. Explicitly or implicitly, we are always making our way in time,imagining ourselves driven towards a clear goal, or just plodding along.Wedo so alone, but we also do so together, as a part of every interaction we en-ter. To capture how people’s lives are structured and how people reproduceand creatively alter their worlds, sociologists should look at how they coor-dinate their futures.

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Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation

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