Working Time

Conceptual Overview

The definition of working time relies on the temporal boundary between working time and nonwork time as separate domains or spheres of life. Nonwork time includes time devoted to family and leisure activities that are temporally distinct from time spent working for an organization. The definition of working time also relates to the distinction between public and private time defined in terms of the extent to which an individual remains accessible to others, regardless of how this time is actually used. Hence working time may include periods in which individuals must be available to work even if they are not called upon to do so.

The management of working time in industrial societies has principally focused on intensifying its usage. Under conditions of early industrialization, working time was defined as something that needed to be controlled and regulated. E. P. Thompson's historical analysis of early English factories suggests that the clock was the central technical measuring device that enabled the commodification of time as a means of exploiting labor. Later industrial relations writers formulated the notion of the effort bargain as a way of understanding the process whereby employees sell their time to the organization in exchange for payment. This involves measurement of time as an indicator of productivity or effort. Working time is thereby classified as a finite resource that can be bought, sold, and spent efficiently.

Despite managerial attempts to control working time, there are many ways in which its control may be resisted. Classic ethnographic studies of industrial relations in the 1960s and 1970s focused on the ways that workers manage their working time in order to resist managerial control over it, for example, by controlling their rate of productivity or by creating times when they could rest during the working day while still being paid for it. Workers in Donald Roy's study also initiated their own temporal order to deal with the [Page 1636]boredom associated with working time by establishing routines to punctuate the working day involving social activities when workers would play practical jokes on each other. These studies suggested that working time can be experienced differently by different social groups within the organization, thereby advancing an interpretive view of working time as subjectively experienced in ways that do not necessarily coincide with clock time.

Critical Commentary and Future Directions

Analyses of working time in the postindustrial era have highlighted the impact of what David Harvey describes as time-space compression that concerns the speeding up of life and the erosion of spatial barriers under conditions of globalization. Since the 1980s, the management of working time has focused primarily on finding ways of achieving greater flexibility in its usage as a way of reducing labor costs and increasing productivity. This has been achieved through initiatives that have been designed to reorganize working time more flexibly in order to meet operational demands by extending the period of time during which the employee is available to work. Reductions in working time have also been negotiated in exchange for assurances of longer-term security of employment in industries and societies where there is a declining need for labor. There has also been a trend in relatively affluent societies toward part-time and temporary employment associated with boundaryless careers that rely on a more fluid conception of working time as not necessarily bought or owned by the organization. New forms of outworking have also affected the definition of working time by blurring the temporal and spatial boundaries between work and other spheres of activity.

...