© p. di nicola 2010 „ time and work: a sociological approach “ patrizio di nicola hamburg,...
TRANSCRIPT
© P. Di Nicola 2010
„Time and work: a
sociological approach“
Patrizio Di Nicola
Hamburg, 16-18 February 2010
© P. Di Nicola 2010
At the beginning was otium
•Aristotele: the otium as sense of life for free people.
•The possibility of doing nothing but arts and literature depends by the slavery system
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Three main stages
Archaic society Sacred time Industrial Society Working
time Post-Industrial Society
Leisure time
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New Rules
• Rule of Saint Benedict in 540: Monks must be always engaged in activities, their time must be dedicated to prayer and work.
• This open the way to a new attention to the time
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Church Time and Merchant Time
In the Middle Age emerges a new and measurable time, which is linked to the professional activities of the merchants
In 1355 the Governor of Artois authorized the citizens of a French city to build a belfry whose bells where dedicated to timing the commercial transactions and the working time in textile industry
Merchants discover the price of time (in loan, or in trips) and start to bill for the time elapsed
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Time management
Need of measurement: first hydraulic clocks (around year 1000), first mechanic clocks (year 1300).
Need of synchronisation: Charles V orders in 1370 to sync all the clocks of Paris with the one on top of Palais Royal
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The coming of industrial society
The combination of the new machines, the new metallurgy and the new energy source increased immeasurably what people could produce.
‘In my establishment in New Lanark, mechanical power and operations superintended by about 2,000 young persons and adults…now complete as much work as 60 years before would have required the entire working population of Scotland,’ (Robert Owen, 1815)
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Workers brought up in the countryside were used to the rhythm of the seasons, to short periods of intense labour interspersed with longer periods with opportunities for relaxation. They would not only take Sunday off but also, if they could, Monday (known as ‘Saint Monday’ in England and ‘Blue Monday’ in Germany).
Breaking such habits became an obsession for the factory owners. The machines had to be worked from sunrise to sunset, and longer still once the invention of gaslights made night work possible. Clocks installed in factories were there to hammer home the new saying, ‘Time is money’.
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New Factory System
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Interiorisation of working time
The industrial age doesn’t need only a perfect measurement of time; it needs the interiorisation of working time
Herbert Gutman wrote many pages on irregular and undisciplined work patterns of factory workforce before 1843
A New Hampshire cotton factory that hired mostly women and children forbade "spirituous liquor, smoking, nor any kind of amusement. . . in the workshops, yards, or factories" and promised the "immediate and disgraceful dismissal" of employees found gambling, drinking, or commit ting "any other debaucheries."
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The industrial rules
According to Gutman employers responded differently to such behavior by first-generation factory hands. "Moral reform" as well as carrot-and-stick policies meant to transform such work habits.
The big problem was how to transform a population of peasants and immigrants in an industrial workforce
Piece rate wage was a strong argument to convince workers to more productive hours in the factory
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Piece rate
According to Gantt (1916), “the employer has forced them (the workers) into a class by keeping their wages uniform, and it is but a short step from such a class to a union. With the union comes first collective bargaining, then demands, then strikes.”
An answer was to link wage to productivity. Piece rate was, with the time measurement, the basic of the managerial reform proposed by Frederick W. Taylor in 1905
But the new factory system designed by Ford in 1917 based on the assembly line and segmentation of tasks make less important the piece rate
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Intellectual work
With the post industrial society many intellectual jobs emerge: white collars, managerial staff, professional jobs.
Those jobs are normally not lead by time, but by task to be fulfilled (even if the largest part of the wage still depends by time spent in the firm)
MBO is the magic word who instill pressure to intellectual and professional workers
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The term "management by objectives" was first popularized by Peter Drucker in his 1954 book 'The Practice of Management'.
The essence of MBO is participative goal setting, choosing course of actions and decision making. An important part of the MBO is the measurement and the comparison of the employee’s actual performance with the standards set.
Ideally, when employees themselves have been involved with the goal setting and the choosing the course of action to be followed by them, they are more likely to fulfill their responsibilities.
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But…
Unrealistic objectives lead the managers to high level of stress
Flexibility, new technologies, and the opportunities to work beyond contracted hours (e.g., take work home) have made work more time-greedy than before.
According to J.B. Shore, the Americans worked an average of 163 hours more in 1987 than in 1969–nearly a full work-month longer.
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Chronic Time Pressure
One of the most pervasive experiences in contemporary society is the shortage of time.
Day-to-day life is often described as rushed and hurried
Time Megatrends are: Increasing work hours The shrinking vacation time, Increasing demands from employers for
unpaid overtime Increasing disparities between males and
women in employment Women and man have different approach to
time: women fulfil gender norms when they accommodate work to family life, while men fulfil them when they put their business first.
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Annual working hours along the ages
Year Type of worker Annual hours
13th century Adult male peasant, UK 1620 hours
14th century Casual laborer, UK 1440 hours
Middle Ages English worker 2309 hours
1400-1600 Farmer-miner, adult male, UK 1980 hours
1840 Average worker, UK 3105-3588 hours
1850 Average worker, U.S. 3150-3650 hours
1987 Average worker, U.S. 1949 hours
1988 Manufacturing workers, UK 1855 hours
2004 Average worker, Germany 1364 hours
2008 Average worker, India 2817-3443 hours
Compiled from various sources by Juliet B. Schor
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Annual working
time along the space
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Usage of time, UK, 2002
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Reduction of Working Time?
Reduction of working time was a successful Union strategy up to 1970
Reductions in Germany (Volkswagen, 1994) and in France (1998) did fail: workers experimented reductions of wage and intensification of workload.
In both the cases the reduction was not aimed to increase the quality of live, but to the need to fight unemployment
Many people, specially managerial staff, did not look at less hours of work (when paid with a reduction of wage), but to a more flexible configuration of working time
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Work – life balance?
A possibly answer to the increasing time pressure is Work-Life Balance
But workers’ preferences and actual life situations are more complicated than most analyses of work-life balance issues suggest
A well-paid employee, for instance, can buy time (by paying others to do tasks like cleaning home) or can decide where and when to work in odd hours (a manger can work from home on Friday evening, while a pizza maker has to go at the restaurant)
Flexibility tends to have different meanings at different occupational levels. For manual occupations, labour flexibility usually means at the employers’ discretion
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Pay attention to the differences
High-level long hours employees tend to explain why they accept these schedules in terms of job satisfaction; low-level employees tend to say that they need the money
Middle class couples, who overall have the longer joint hours of paid work, manage to spend more time together than working class couples who work fewer hours overall but are more likely to work at (different) odd hours
