Time and Social Identity

The paper aims to emphazise the close relations between identity, construction processes and temporal dimension. Analyzing the central concepts of "action", "continuity" and "shared time", we illustrate their radical changes caused by modernity and postmodernity. The phenomena of "discontinuous identity", "life project crisis" and "situationalism" are identified as outcomes of these sudden changes. We conclude that human reflexivity may represent a barrier to instrumental reduction of social relations, strengthen the interpersonal credibility, reconstitute subjective identity continuity.