Temporal Structuration: Negotiating Reproductive Timing in Urban China

This article develops the concept of temporal structuration to explain how actors engage temporal norms as social structures. Based on 64 life story interviews in Shenzhen and analysed through constructivist grounded theory, it examines reproductive timing in urban China, where marriage and childbearing are organised by a dense timetable enforced through kin relations. The analysis identifies a situated repertoire of four types of strategy: accommodation, transformation, redirection and identity-based claims, which participants combined and redeployed as relationships, pressures and available resources changed. The strategies act upon the norm's enforcement, justification, operating conditions and applicability, respectively, while drawing on the categories and relationships that sustain it. Postponement thus emerges as a relational accomplishment, maintained through practical, justificatory, identity and emotion work. Temporal structuration thus captures the recursive process through which actors secure room for alternative timing while reproducing-and potentially, through collective accumulation, altering-the norm's authority and operation. This article therefore extends the temporal dimension of structure and agency, advances the empirical understanding of temporal agency, and enriches the processual understanding of temporal experience.