For the first half of the 20th century, sociology was one of the closest allies of social psychology. Over the past four decades, however, the connection with sociology has weakened, whereas new connections with neighboring disciplines (e.g., biology, economics, political science) have formed. Along the way, the sociological perspective has been largely lost in mainstream social psychology in the United States. Most social psychologists today are not concerned with collective phenomena and do not investigate social structural factors (e.g., residential mobility, socioeconomic status, dominant religion, political systems). Even when the social structural factors are included in the analysis, psychologists typically treat them as individual difference variables. Sociologist C. Wright Mills famously promoted sociological imagination, or the ability to see distal yet important social forces operating in a larger societal context. By comparing sociological perspectives to psychological perspectives, this article highlights the insights that the sociological perspective and sociological imagination can bring to social psychology.

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For many social scientists, clock time is seen as either a mechanism of economic power relations that reinforces social domination or a resource that facilitates individual marketoriented action. In this article I develop a neo-Weberian perspective that presents clock time as a moral institution that shapes social action in modernity through two "time disciplines": regularity and density. Where regularity supports a methodical life, density maintains a life of constant activity. The article traces the history of regularity and density between the fourth and twentieth centuries: from a "culture of vigilance," which originated in Benedictine monastic culture, to a "culture of busyness," which arose within Protestant and Renaissance culture. It shows that although we often think of busyness, time pressure, and burnout as contemporary problems, they have long been at the root of clock time culture. By extending Weber's approach, the paper provides deeper insight into the fraught moral life of clock time in modernity.