The Role of Time in the Action of the Consumer

Abstract

A phenomenological approach was used to study the temporal system of consumers, an important but neglected aspect of individual action and consumer behavior. Two patterns of temporal attitude with profoundly different implications for consumer behavior were identified: some individuals appear to live and act as if they are more subject to deterministic functioning in relation to their temporal orientation, while others appear subject to voluntaristic functioning. Different temporal orientations may induce different sorts of motivation, different plans, the consumption of different types of products, and different specific attitudes that elicit a certain organizational process in relation to products. B y explicitly ignoring time, or by simply regarding it as "another variable," the decision-making models of consumer research do not account for the way that individuals and societies view time and how this apprehension affects consumer choices. Time can have a multitude of meanings, such as, for example, ecological time (Braudel 1969), economic time (Becker 1965), social time (Merleau-Ponty 1962), individual time (Sartre 1956), ideal time (Augustine 1954), and so on.These "times" are perceived by the individual when planning actions, but their diversity does not lend itself easily to analysis (Hendriks and Peters 1986). Nevertheless, some attempts have been made to unite these different elements. Settle, Alreck, and Glasheen (1978) measured individuals' ability to remember their past and work out future plans, their perception of the passing of time, their skill in organizing and executing their plans chronologically, and their ability to wait for a reward. Holman (1980) developed a scale making possible the classification of individuals according to their awareness of the control (or lack of control) they have over their own future and their ability (or lack of ability) to anticipate the future. Gonzalez and Zimbardo (1985) defined seven different types of people by measuring temporal orientation and other variables, *Michelle M. Bergadaa is an associate professor at the Ecole Superieure des Sciences Economiques et Commerciales, B.P. 105, 95021 Cergy-Pontoise Cedex, France. She gratefully acknowledges the intellectual support ofYvan Allaire, director of the dissertation that is the basis of this article, and also thanks Gilles Laurent, Corinne Faure, and Bernard Pras for their help on previous versions of the manuscript. The anonymous JCR reviewers are thanked for their constructive criticism and encouragement. Finally, the author wishes to thank the 15 persons who agreed to devote time for the interviews, without whom this research would not have been complete, 289 such as individual ways of deciding on and planning actions, degree of fatalism, hedonism, and so forth. Quantitative studies of this kind are sufficiently intriguing to make one want to discover the reasons for these attitudes, the way in which they manifest themselves, and their consequences for consumer behavior.To understand individuals' actions in...

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