There is no time for time: a critical review of temporality within Social Representations Theory

Time is foundational to social life, yet Social Representations Theory has often treated it as the background against which representations change, rather than as a dimension of meaning-making in its own right. This critical review distinguishes processual dynamics (how representations emerge, stabilize, circulate, and transform) from temporality: how past, present, and future are socially and symbolically constituted. From here, it examines structural, dialogical, sociodynamic, and genetic approaches in order to trace how these traditions have engaged with the past through narratives, memories, and histories, and with the future through projects, expectations, and anticipations. The review shows that all four traditions contain temporal assumptions, but that the field has developed fuller accounts of how the past organizes the present than of how possible futures orient collective life. Drawing together conceptual resources already present within the theory, we propose a re-temporalization organized around four components: temporal contents, representational processes, projects, and projections. This agenda treats time as symbolically constructed, experientially lived, normatively encoded, and politically distributed. It enables research to examine how groups negotiate temporal pace, direction, reversibility, and legitimacy, and how unequal capacities to define the past and the future shape representational life. Re-temporalizing SRT therefore deepens the theory’s concern with common-sense knowledge by linking continuity and transformation to the politics of memory and anticipation.