ВОПРОСЫ ТЕОРИИ И МЕТОДОЛОГИИ THE MONASTERY AS A PATTERN FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF TIME: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY OF MODERNIZATION PROCESSES J. Šubrt Faculty of Humanities Charles University in Prague U Křнže 8, Praha 5, Czech Republic, 15800 The article examines the role of monasteries in the development of civilization, especially at the onset of modernization. <...> Particular attention is focused on the development of scheduling and time management, in which they played an important part, and contributed to the promotion of a rationalization that has found application in various areas of modern society (production, military, education, medicine, etc.) Life in monasteries became an inspiration not only for practice but also for many utopian projects of social reform. <...> Modernization has been regarded by thinkers such as Michel Foucault or Anthony Giddens as a process of the development of institutions co-ordinating the temporal, spatial and social dimension of human action. <...> The starting point for the following reflections on time and discipline is Norbert Elias's theory of the civilizing process, which focuses on mutual linkage between the development of the evolution of the personality structures and structure of behaviour of the individual (psychogenesis) and the evolution of social structures of inequality, power and order (sociogenesis). <...> Elias regards pyschogenesis as a process involving the gradual formation of psychological structures regulating the behaviour of the individual (in Freudian terminology these structures are conceived in terms of the super-ego). <...> The shift in the control of instincts and affects is at first the result of pressure from the outside, i.e. external restraint (Fremdzwang), but if this is to be permanent it must be transformed into self-restraint (Selbstzwang). 32 Šubrt J. The Monastery as a pattern for the management of time: a contribution to the historical. <...> One of the questions raised by Elias in the context of his civilizational theory is that of time. <...> For Elias, time is chiefly a problem of the sociology of knowledge [9]. <...> A whole series of social scientists had devoted attention to the problem of time before Elias (1). <...> Werner Sombart drew attention to the fact that “modern capitalism” demands a high degree of precision and reliability in the measurement of time, and this affects consciousness and behaviour [25. <...> For Lewis Mumford, the essential machine of the modern age is not the steam engine, but the clock. <...> In his book “Technics and Civilization” (1934), we find an idea that we shall now <...>