The time-making capacity of the technology industry and its consequences for public life

Abstract

In the past few decades, the technology industry has been wielding increasing power over public life as it intervenes in many social domains including education. These interventions occur not only through the products and services the industry sells or provides in these domains but also through direct interactions between technology industry personnel and actors within these domains. Drawing on 23 interviews with Israeli school principals (as well as a supplemental set of 20 interviews with technology industry volunteers and Ministry of Education documents), we identify the prominence of temporality as a dimension of how school principals perceive and, at times, experience their interactions with the technology industry. We find that many principals perceive technology workers’ time as scarcer and more valuable than that of school staff and students. Volunteering technology firms act as time-makers setting the temporal conditions of the interactions which tend to be short-term, irregular, and constantly changing while schools are mostly time-takers, adapting their schedules – with ministry encouragement – to those of firms or avoiding such interactions altogether. We consider how this subverts public actors’ autonomy from private interests while also noting how some educators exercise sovereignty by opposing such irregular interventions.