Skip main navigation

New lower prices! Get up to 50% off 1000s of courses. 

Explore courses

Introducing time and space

This video introduces Edward T. Hall’s concepts of Chronemics (time orientations) and Proxemics (space orientations). These provide helpful ways of de

This video introduces Edward T. Hall’s concepts of Chronemics (time orientations) and Proxemics (space orientations). These provide helpful ways of describing or contrasting culture standards for what is considered appropriate.

Culture is clearly more than just the context. Among the many other domains of culture, Edward T. Hall and other intercultural scholars have also observed behaviors related to how people use or respond to time and space in communication. Hall coined two terms:

Proxemics, for the varied perceptions and uses of distance and space (the primary focus in his book, The Hidden Dimension, 1966 and his academic reference work, The Handbook of Proxemic Research, 1974).

Chronemics, for analyzing various approaches to time (explored further in his later book, The Dance of Life 1983). This domain looks at how we treat time in nonverbal communication, how we perceive, structure, expect and react to frames related to time in our cultural systems. Hall coined the terms Mono- and Poly-chronic for describing contrasting patterns and Tom Bruneau coined the term Chronemics in 1973.

His proxemics work shows how most of us have personal and social space bubbles that we maintain. These form an invisible sense of appropriate distances according to the culture standards we’ve adopted, mostly by observed mimicry. Therefore they are best discovered in other contexts by training our observations, which we hope you’ll actively do in the next step.

Further resources:

We highly recommend Jeff Berglund’s “Space (Proxemics)” entry in the Sage Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication Competence and have provided the downloadable article.

This article is from the free online

Intercultural Communication: Dynamics of cultural identities in global interaction

Created by
FutureLearn - Learning For Life

Reach your personal and professional goals

Unlock access to hundreds of expert online courses and degrees from top universities and educators to gain accredited qualifications and professional CV-building certificates.

Join over 18 million learners to launch, switch or build upon your career, all at your own pace, across a wide range of topic areas.

Start Learning now