A bureaucracy founded to perform a trivial task (synchronizing public clocks) expands into an elaborate self-perpetuating organization complete with departments, publications, and ideology. The institution's growth is driven not by the usefulness of the task but by the employment, prestige, and activity it generates for those inside it.
Modernization is portrayed as the mechanical imposition of uniform standards (every clock set alike) mistaken for genuine advancement. Standardizing surface behavior substitutes for, and disguises the absence of, deeper cultural or material change.
Reading a society through its relationship to clock time reveals the tension between inherited rhythms (prayer times, leisurely coffeehouse hours) and an imposed regime of precise, punitive measurement. The quarrel over how to tell time becomes a visible index of a civilization caught between tradition and borrowed Western order.