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Workplace Temporalities
Time-Work Discipline in the 21st Century
Beth A. Rubin
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 TIME-W ORK DISCIPLINE IN THE
21ST CENTURY

Beth A. Rubin
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ABSTRACT

The introduction to Volume 17 of Research in the Sociology of Work:

W orkplace Temporalities, reviews prior literature and issues in the
studies o f time at work. It provides a brief summary o f the chapters in this
volume and addresses some o f the major themes, particularly those
with which sociologists might be unfamiliar, since this volume is, quite
deliberately, interdisciplinary. The chapters in this volume demonstrate
the complexities o f workplace temporalities in the new economy and sug­
gest that incorporating inquiry about time will inform understanding not
only o f the contemporary workplace, but also o f social life more broadly.

The transition to a global, 24/7, technologically mediated, flexible economy

has transform ed working life in a myriad of ways. The range of organiza­
tional and micro-level responses to these macro-economic changes has been
considerable, and social scientists across a number of disciplines share an
interest in the relationship between these changes and time. Social scientists’
refocused collective inquiry about time has led to a veritable explosion of
research and theorizing about the temporalities of social, work, and organi­
zational life. W hat is particularly interesting about this focus is that it

Workplace Temporalities
Research in the Sociology of Work, Volume 17, 1-26
Copyright © 2007 by Elsevier Ltd.
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ISSN: 0277-2833/doi:10.1016/S0277-2833(07)17001-1
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© Em erald G roup Publishing Lim ited

 highlights a m ajor mechanism connecting structures and practices at
different levels of social life. The chapters in this volume address these
temporalities in various ways in their efforts to understand, explain, and
analyze the transform ation of working life, the complexities of temporality,
and the consequences for women and men as they attem pt to negotiate a
new world.
C urrent research increasingly identifies various ways in which changing
tem poral structures, cultures, and experiences at work are integral ‘‘timing
tools’’ in post-m odern societies and their organizations (Pescosolido &
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Rubin, 2000). Implicit in this growing body of literature is that these timing
tools are recalibrating to attune contem porary workplace and social prac­
tices to new rhythms, paces, routines, and schedules the tem poral structures
that characterize the current economy. That recalibration includes the
transform ation of workers’ ‘‘time sense,’’ a theme that runs through much
of the research in this volume. The scholarship on time at work develops
arguments that in one way or another, extend or follow from Thom pson’s
(1967) classic study of the transform ation of task to clock time. Thom pson
identified the transform ation of workers’ ‘‘time sense’’ as the necessary
consequence of industrialization. H e argued that changing divisions of lab­
or, increasing supervision, new time-keeping technologies (the watch), and
providing m onetary rewards, resulted in ideological and socialization shifts
that led to new labor habits, a new time-discipline, and a new worker time
sense (Thom pson, 1967, p. 90). That new time sense was essential for the
productive effort of the newly emergent industrial workers.
Similarly, the chapters in this volume point to parallel changes in the
current era. Now, globalization, changing employment contracts, flattened
hierarchies, inform ation technology, and the search for flexibility and
profitability lead to new forms of control and a new time discipline. These
meso- and macro-level changes interact with the personalities and experi­
ences of individuals who themselves differ in orientations and interpreta­
tions of time to create a new, uniquely ‘post-m odern’ time sense, reorganized
in ways th at shift how life is lived.
This shift is certainly reflected in the larger culture and popular press that
consistently highlights the new temporalities of daily life. Books about hurry
sickness and speed-up (Gleick, 1999) examine the difficulties, or pleasures, of
negotiating work and family either aided or hindered by technologies that
allow instantaneous communication and flows of information and knowledge,
and that seemingly erase the boundaries over time and space and between
spheres of social life (though see Poster, below). As did E. P. Thompson’s
analysis of that earlier transition, these accounts also identify not just the
 changes at work, but also the changed relationship between ‘‘work and life’’
(Thompson, 1967, p. 60).
An organizing principle framing this volume is that these larger social
perceptions are explained by a new tim e-w ork discipline that is meshed or
entrained to the rhythms of the 24/7 economy and its reorganized workplace
temporalities. U nderstanding these relationships motivates this volume.
U nderstanding widespread social transform ation requires, then, serious in­
vestigation of changed time at work. This task requires asking questions
about more than the num ber of hours people work. The debate in the
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literature on th at count is well documented and continues in roughly a third

of the chapters below (see Schor, 1991; Robinson & Godbey, 1999; Maume
& Bellas, 2001; Jacobs & Gerson, 2004). It also entails scrutinizing, anal­
yzing, and understanding the reconfiguration of work time. T hat is, it is not
only the number of hours that is in question, but it is also the very con­
struction of those hours.
Understanding that construction of work time contributes to explanation
of the new time sense of the 21st century workplace. As Thom pson (1967)
notes in his study of the prior era, a new economy requires not just an
economic shift, but a social shift in which employees become habituated not
only to new ways of working, but also to a new ‘‘internalized habit of
industry.’’ Invoking these processes points us to the ways in which social life
is co-created out of interaction.
As the authors in this volume demonstrate, there are a myriad of ways to
scrutinize work time. In their investigations, a number of constructs appear
repeatedly as I discuss below. The next section of this chapter situates the
current volume in the context of historical and extant studies of time. The
subsequent section provides a brief overview of the chapters alluding to
some of the commonalities and differences in their approaches to workplace
temporalities.

PROBLEMATIZING TIME IN THE WORKPLACE

Though time is implicated in every aspect of workplace and organizational
activity (Usunier, 1991), until recently, the tendency, with few exceptions,
has been to focus on ‘‘clock time’’ and its economies (Gershuny, 2000;
Jacobs & Gerson, 2004; Perlow et al., 2002; M acan, 1994; Zerubavel, 1981).1
T hat is, the focus has been on using each hour, minute, and second as
efficiently and productively as possible.
 W ith the exception of extensions of Taylor’s (1911) time and m otion stud­
ies, and research on time management (Macan, 1994), few social scientists
problematized time in social science literature until the 1980s (Blount, 2004;
Ancona, Goodm an, Lawrence, & Tushman, 2001; see Clark, 1985; M cGrath
& Kelly, 1982; Bluedorn & Denhardt, 1988; Bluedorn, 2002; Schein, 1982;
Lee & Liebenau, 1999; Goodm an, Lawrence, Ancona, & Tushman, 2001).
Likewise, with the exception of Zerubavel’s research on time in organizations
(1976, 1979), sociological inquiry on temporality has also been relatively
limited (Barley, 1988; Fine, 1990 with some exceptions, see Gurvitch, 1964).
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This long gap in the consideration of time at work is surprising given its place
in early sociological analyses of the employment relationship.
Temporal issues have been at the core of classical sociological theorizing
about the workplace. Despite that classical legacy, scholars did not focus on
temporalities of the workplace until relatively recently. Durkheim was the
first sociologist to explicitly conceptualize time as a social construction
(1915/1965). Time, for Durkheim, was another ‘‘social fact’’ that lay outside
of individual consciousness. In distinguishing sacred from profane time,
Durkheim defined time as the collective expression of the rhythm of social
life (Durkheim, 1915/1965; Nowotny, 1992; Bergman, 1992; Zerubavel,
1976; Bluedorn & D enhardt, 1988). F or M arx (1867/1967), control of labor
time was at the heart of capitalist social relations. The commodification of
time was a crucial dynamic in the creation of capitalist class relations and
the struggle over labor time was the essence of class struggle.
Even more directly concerned with time in organizations were Weber
(1958) and Simmel (1950). W eber’s analysis of the increasing rationalization
of social life is imbued with the rationalization of social rhythms. In his
analysis of the emergence of capitalism and its association with the P rot­
estant reform ation, as with his analysis of rational bureaucracy, W eber fo­
cused on the means-end calculus, which is the basis of rational modern
thought. T hat means-end calculus entails a transform ation of temporal
processes from event-based to regular, orderly, organized, scheduled, and
linear processes of m odern life (Zerubavel, 1976; Nowotny, 1992, 1994).
Likewise, Simmel (1950) was concerned with punctuality and calculability as
key components of the m odern era (Starkey, 1988; Bluedorn & Denhardt,
1988). Thus, classical social theorists identified changing tem poral structures
as central to the emergence of m odern society (see, Adam, 1990; Nowotny,
1992; Bergman, 1992 for overviews), yet research on the workplace has left
consideration of time implicit or limited.
Similarly neglected until lately has, with the exception of Roy (1960), been
examination of employees’ experience of time on the job (Clark, 1985; Fine,
 1990). In many ways, that temporalities in working life and their impact on
employees have not always been central is surprising since in order both to
survive and accomplish organizational goals, organizations m ust attend to
routine, schedule, pacing (speed), allocation, sequencing (prioritizing), syn­
chronizing (timing), and punctuality (Zerubavel, 1976, 1979; Schriber, 1985;
Schriber & Gutek, 1987; Barley, 1988; Fine, 1990; Nowotny, 1992; Adam,
1995; Hassard, 1991; Cappelli et al., 1997; Perlow, 1999; Y akura, 2001;
Perlow, Okhysen, & Repinning, 2002; G oodm an et al., 2001). Likewise,
much of the analyses of struggles over labor control have had control and
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use of working time at their center. Yet, time itself remained as backdrop
until recently.
Certainly since the 1980s, social scientists across disciplines have re­
focused their interest in the economies of time. They have renewed inquiry
into ways to save, budget, deepen, use, cycle, strategically plan, and manage
time (see, for instance, Hassard, 1999; Kleiner, 1992; Bower & H out, 1988;
Ancona & Chong, 1996; Mintzberg, 1994; Jacques, 1982; M acan, 1994;
Perlow et al., 2002). Thus, the urgency of the 24/7 economy has revived
concern with economies of time.
Likewise, social scientists have not only expanded the analysis beyond the
economies of organizational time, but also reconsidered its social construc­
tion and centrality to organizational culture (Bluedorn & D enhardt, 1988;
Bluedorn, 2002; Ballard & Seibold, 2006; Clark, 1985; Schein, 1982;
Schriber & Gutek, 1987; Das, 1993; Adam, 1995; Thom pson & Bunderson,
2001). This emerging concern with organizational time is linked to organ­
izational efforts to respond to the changing economy that operates globally,
thus 24 hours, 7 days a week (Presser, 2003).
M ore than sociologists (until very recently), I/O psychologists and m an­
agement scholars (many of whom appear in this volume) have dominated
the inquiry into workers’ experience and construction of time. These schol­
ars took the lead in developing such concepts as individual time sense, time
urgency (Blount & Janicick, 2001), time experience (Butler, 1995), time
perspective (Blount & Janicick, 2001), time horizon (Dubinskas, 1988), and
tem poral personality (Kaufm an, Lane, & Lindquist, 1991a, 1991b).2
Other studies that depart from this micro-level approach attend to more
macro-components of temporality and focus on organizational cultures
(Schein, 1982; Schriber & Gutek, 1987; Das, 1992; Dubinskas, 1988;
Barley, 1988; Butler, 1995; Bluedorn, Kalliath, Strube, & Martin, 1999;
Bluedorn, 2002; Benabou, 1999; Onken, 1999; and see the review in Lee &
Liebenau, 1999).3 This research, despite its focus on individuals, is still framed
within the larger logic of E. P. Thom pson’s arguments about changing
 economic and workplace structures and their implication for individuals’
work discipline, a major component of which is their ‘‘time sense.’’
E. P. Thom pson’s analysis of the new time sense, and its associated
work discipline examined the transition of employees’ experience of time
organized around the completion of tasks, to that organized by the clock.
This distinction has remained one that is crucial for scholars of time at
work. Thus, research has examined the distinction between ‘‘clock time’’
(see below) and social time (Clark, 1985; Barley, 1988; Bluedorn &
D enhardt, 1988; Hassard, 1999) and tem poral values (Bluedorn et al. 1999).
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These studies examine the distinction between notions of time as a universal,

linear, and standardized unit and time as variable, individual, and con­
structed (Adam, 1995; Yakura, 2001; Ballard & Seibold, 2006; Flaherty,
2003). This concern with the transition to and from clock time runs
throughout the chapters in this volume from Ballard in the second chapter
through Rubin in the concluding chapter.
In recognizing a multiplicity of organizational times (Bluedorn & Denhardt,
1988; Bluedorn, 2002; Clark, 1985), this research has also identified differences
in individuals’ temporal personalities. Management scholars and I/O psy­
chologists have drawn on the work of anthropologist Hall (1983) to explore
differences between monochronic or M time, and polychronic or P time, and
linked those differences to organizational cultures. Simply, while Hall was
interested in national cultural differences, research has demonstrated that in­
dividuals have temporal personalities in which polychronic individuals prefer
to do multiple things at once and monochronic individuals prefer to complete
a task before moving on to the next (see, especially, Bluedorn & Denhardt,
1988).
M uch of this literature has focused on the organizational desirability of
creating correspondence between organizational demands and individuals’
tem poral personalities (Bluedorn & D enhardt, 1988; K aufm an et al., 1991a,
1991b; Usunier, 1991; Bluedorn et al., 1999; Lee, 1999; Onken, 1999;
Saunders et al., 2004). W ithin this vein, scholars have also examined time in
groups with a particular emphasis on the temporalities of team work (see
Blount, 2004).
An additional impetus to focus on time and work emerges from the
pressure on families and their subsequent experience of the ‘‘time bind’’
(Hochschild, 1997), ‘‘time famine’’ (Perlow, 1997), ‘‘boundary problem ’’
(Kirchmeyer, 1995), and ‘‘spillover’’ (Mennino, Rubin, & Brayfield, 2005).
These issues have been a m ajor focus of sociological investigations of time
and work and tend to conceptualize time as a scarce resource. This con­
ceptualization motivates research on the ways in which restructured work
 intensifies the difficulty dual-earner families have managing the demands
both of work and family. As employers increasingly rely on long hours to
evaluate employee commitment and seek to extract more work out of each
employee over a greater part of the day’s 24 hours, the boundary between
the work place and home weakens and pressures on family escalate (Epstein,
Seron, Oglensky, & Saute;, 1999; Bailyn, 1993; Hochschild, 1997; Daly, 1996;
Nippert-Eng, 1996; Perlow, 1998; Jacobs & Gerson, 2004; Rubin & Brody,
2005; Brody & Rubin, 2005).
Dual-income families, now the norm, struggle to negotiate these increased
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pressures on scarce familial resources, a m ajor one of which is time (Bailyn,

1993; Bittman & Wajcman, 2000; Daly, 1996; Hochschild, 1997; Jacobs &
Gerson, 2004; Kossek & Lambert, 2005; Moen, 2003; Epstein & Kalleberg,
2004; Perlow, 1997; Presser, 1998, 2003; Thom pson & Bunderson, 2001;
Mennino et al., 2005 among m any others). The chapters in this volume,
however, build on and complement those studies with a focus on workplace
temporalities, since the argument here is that tem poral structures and
experiences at work are the precursors to this boundary problem between
work and home. While the direct relationship between increasingly time-
demanding work cultures and greater pressure on families is increasingly
apparent,4 new ways of structuring time in organizations carries over into
non-workplace lives, in part as the work carries over as well (Bailyn, 1993;
Mennino et al., 2005).
W hat is clear from this growing body of literature across disciplines is that
the temporalities of contem porary life in both the home and workplace have
shifted dramatically, and understanding these changes is crucial for under­
standing social life more broadly. For example, the research on work-fam ily
boundary problems points to stress, turnover, absenteeism, and other neg­
ative outcomes (Perlow, 1997; Bailyn, 1993; Kirchmeyer, 1995; Mennino
et al., 2005). Likewise, the tem poral congruence literature suggests that the
absence of congruence can lead to less productivity, greater employee stress,
and other impediments to organizational success. In what follows I turn to
some themes common to many of the chapters.

ENTRAINMENT, TEMPORAL STRUCTURE, AND

TEMPORAL PERSONALITY

There are a number of concepts that appear early in the volume that
reappear in a variety of ways throughout. I point out several of these
 because they are typically derived from fields outside of sociology, but are
concepts from which sociological scholars of work and organizations could
have considerable purchase. One of the m ost evocative concepts on which
many of the authors in this volume rest is that of entrainm ent. Social
entrainment is an interactional approach to analysis of hum an tem poral­
ities. As Blount and Leroy (this volume) point out, entrainment is a concept
that social scientists have drawn from physics and biology. It is the process
by which living organisms’ pace and timing of behavior mesh with that of
some cycle, rhythm , or pace in their environment. W hat makes this concept
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particularly compelling, is that there may be no necessary reason for the

organism’s behavior or timing of behavior to mesh with that “pace-setter”
in the environment. Professors, for example, organize their presentation of
class content into 10 or 15 weeks, depending on the school’s semester or
trimester schedule and independent of the am ount of time that might be
ideal for teaching that content. Thus, the conveyance of intellectual content
is entrained to some external schedule (see Ancona & Chong, 1996). Socio­
logists have paid scant attention to this concept and the literature on
entrainment. I argue, however, that it has great potential to explain some of
the mechanisms by which macro-level phenomena drive organizational and
micro-level phenomena.
A second concept that many of the authors in this volume employ, with
some variation in specific components, is temporal structure. Workplace
(and other) organizational tasks create an organization’s tem poral structure
that is a way of organizing time, independent of the norms, expectations,
beliefs, interpretations, and understandings that comprise an organization’s
culture (Schein, 1982; M artin, 2002). While the authors may differ on the
specific components of this structure, many of them consider it a crucial
factor for understanding the workplace.
A third concept that plays a role in many of these papers is the idea that
individuals have ‘‘tem poral personalities.” One of the most im portant (for
these papers) ways in which people’s tem poral personalities differ is in their
preference to do one thing at a time, that is, whether they are monochronic or
whether they prefer to do multiple things at a time, that is, whether they are
polychronic. While sociologists (social psychologists excluded) pay scant
attention to issues of personality, the time sense and time preferences of
individuals could be (and in fact research has shown them to be) im portant
to m any of the outcome variables in which sociologists have been interested
(such as job satisfaction and commitment, turnover, alienation, and other
indicators of employees’ subjective assessment of work). So these (and
other) concepts are recurrent in these chapters, and point to some of the key
 constructs that contribute to understanding workplace temporalities. The
rest of this chapter summarizes each of the four parts of the volume.

PART I: NEW TIMES FOR THE NEW ECONOMY

The first part of this volume uses two very different papers to frame the
research th at follows. Though Ballard focuses on interaction (a typical
micro-level concept) and Poster on globalization (the m ost macro-level
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concept), these two chapters provide metaphorical bookends to the others;

each addresses the sweep of time changes across time and space within
which to consider the ways in which workplace temporalities affect, create,
are affected by and created by social life. Both chapters raise issues that
appear throughout the volume; tem poral structure, entrainment, time
pressure, work-fam ily boundary and so on, yet they do so in very different
contexts. Ballard’s socio-historical approach situates the inquiry of w ork­
place temporalities in long sweeps of socio-historical transform ation,
whereas Poster’s examination of how global economy transform s the
tem poral arrangements of day and night for IT workers in India situates the
inquiry into workplace temporalities at the global level.
Ballard extends a communication-based perspective termed chronemics
that attem pts to bridge two dom inant approaches to time - the focus on
time as a linear commodity that can be bought and sold versus time as a
social construction that emerges from interaction. She argues that w ork­
place organizational temporalities emerge through interaction and are for­
malized in symbols. She uses M cG rath and Kelly’s (1986) model of social
entrainment and the four components they identify of rhythm, mesh, tempo,
and pace to revisit E. P. Thom pson’s account of the transition from task
time. She similarly revisits W eber’s analysis of capitalism (in brief, of
course), D urkheim ’s analysis of religion and, finally, the technologies and
significations that embody these new tem poral organizations, specifically the
clock and standardized time zones. Her intent is to dem onstrate the utility of
a chronemic analysis for understanding the ways in which the social
constructions of time and their institutionalized significations are inter-
subjective arising out of communication. H er twist on E. P. Thompson, for
instance, is her focus on the role of communication for producing Western
time consciousness and the culture of industrial work entrained to the lin­
earity of clock time.
Where Ballard focuses on the interaction and significations that created
industrial time consciousness and suggests a way of extending this type of
 analysis into the current era, Poster examines how globalization has trans­
formed the tem poral structure in which Indian IT workers labor. Poster
argues th at globalization not only reverses day and night for Indian IT
workers but, more im portantly, also shows how call center workers ‘‘face
rigidification and standardization and re-territorialization of temporalities.’’
Thus, rather than arguing that the global 24/7 economy has eradicated space
and time (Harvey, 1989), Poster’s ethnographic study of Indian IT workers
reveals quite the contrary.
These employees work in a very new time with high levels of managerial
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control. Poster focuses on the characteristics of a speed driven, globally

networked, inform ation society that leads to new flexibilities (Rubin, 1995,
1996) and new inequalities. M ost germane to this volume is that Poster
claims that restructured temporalities she observed are flexible through
‘‘unhinging time.’’ Call centers in India serve the needs of the West, creating
new structures of stratification in which off-shored and outsourced workers
become part of a Global South that serves the Global N orth. Her account of
the lives of workers who work all night is reminiscent of accounts of early
capitalism’s company towns; these workers, as were those workers, are
subjected to extreme control of aspects of life that include not only their
labor process, but also their living arrangements, transportation, and so on.
Other consequences Poster addresses include urban transform ation, physi­
cal costs, and family care among other things.

PART II: ORGANIZATIONAL TEMPORALITIES

The chapters that comprise P art II take many of the issues that appear in the
first part and isolate them in the context of specific organizational behaviors,
structures, and processes. These chapters draw primarily from managerial
and I/O psychology research.
Ancona and Waller conduct an exploratory study of teams to understand
the ways in which individuals in teams in a single organization experience
time and the ways in which the different teams adapt to random environ­
mental shocks in high stress and time-pressured conditions. One of the
characteristics of the restructured workplace is to move away from linear,
individual-oriented production processes toward more team-based produc­
tion. This reorganization has enormous implications for how individuals
work. It makes networked relationships more im portant, de-layers organ­
izations and shifts the flow, scheduling, and timing of work (see Blount,
2004). Thus, understanding how different teams experience time contributes
 considerably to understanding new types of conflicts, control, and w ork­
place practices.
Ancona and Waller conduct an embedded case study (Yin, 1994) of five
different software development teams. A fundamental question they ask is
whether team behavior is shaped by internal processes generated by the
tasks on which the team is focused or external factors outside of the work
task. W orkplace temporalities enter the process through the cycles of prod­
uct development, entrainm ent to external factors, as well as the larger pres­
sures for speed generated by consumer dem and and the technological
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tethering that allows it. In their interrogation of the team process, Ancona
and Waller test competing theories of team tem poral processes. They find
that in the team s’ search for internal organizational legitimacy and ongoing
survival, teams coordinate their activities to mesh with different external
pacers at different times. Im portantly, team s’ activities become entrained to
the fiscal rhythms of top management.
R ather than adjudicating among three models of team task pacing
(endogenous tasks, external pacers, or adaptation), Ancona and Waller
found th at teams entrained their work task to a variety of factors in what
the authors evocatively call a ‘‘dance of entrainm ent.’’ An im portant insight
for the sociologist of work is to consider the complexity of factors that shape
team behavior. The findings suggest a very non-rational process in which
deadlines may not be attached to task demand but to organizational pacers.
The next chapter by Blount and Leroy on work values develops a model of
individuals’ situated experience of time at work. Thus, Blount and Leroy are
implicitly claiming that there is not a single ‘‘time sense’’ that characterizes
the contem porary worker; rather, as does Ballard, their model allows
individuals’ experience to emerge from a num ber of factors. These include
the individual’s ‘‘tem poral life context’’ (temporal personality, and non­
work tem poral demands, the latter of which sociologists identify as work
life balance), the tem poral structure of the organization (work schedules,
routines, deadlines, rhythms), and the implicit pace and socio-temporal
norms that emerge out of the organizations’ culture.
Individual’s situated experience of time at work is socially constructed from
schemas, personal schedules, and temporal references. Like other authors
who attend to individual preferences, Blount and Leroy consider the rela­
tionships between temporal preference for monochronic versus polychronic
work, non-work temporal demands, and the routines that are currently
present. They make the very sociological point that preferences (rather than
remaining stable as economist might argue) emerge out of individuals’ per­
ceptions of what is normal.
 Their model, then, links the temporal structure of workplace organiza­
tions to psychological processes by dem onstrating how an organization’s
explicit tem poral markers acquire symbolic and normative value. These
markers shape work routines, pace, and flow across organizations and
provide cognitive structures. While this model is explicitly psychological,
incorporating its insights can sharpen sociologists’ inquiry into the experi­
ence of time at work.
In the third chapter in this section, Bluedorn extends his prior research to
examine polychronicity’s relationship to individuals’ orientation toward
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change, propensity for creativity, tolerance for ambiguity, and judgments of

organizations as attractive (or not) places to work. He conducts a series of
sequential studies, based on a two-sample design to examine these relation­
ships and replicate his results. He finds that the more polychronic a person’s
tem poral personality, the more positive their orientation to change. Like­
wise, polychronicity (a personality trait) and perception of an organization’s
attractiveness are also related as Bluedorn expects.
One of the m ajor contributions of this study is that it is the first study that
demonstrates empirical associations among change orientation, tolerance
for ambiguity, and organizational attractiveness - all of which are im portant
for understanding subjective experiences of workers in the contem porary
workplace given its characteristics. M uch of the sociological research has
focused on some of the more material aspects of the economy (downsizing,
displacement, job loss). Bluedorn’s chapter suggests that the relationships
between individuals’ tem poral preferences and the temporal structure of
organizations play an extremely im portant, but relatively under-examined,
role in how positively employees respond to the current economic environ­
ment. The findings here may, for instance, provide some insight into the
psychological underpinnings of the findings Reynolds and Aletraris report
in their chapter later in this volume. While sociological research on the
workplace typically uses very different types of data, Bluedorn has provided
the sociological community some im portant considerations and questions to
pose in future research.
The final study in this section departs somewhat from the previous three,
but its focus is still on how internal organizational processes impact
employees. Ruiz-Ben’s qualitative study of IT workers in Germany, like the
authors above, concentrates on factors that affect individuals’ time con­
ception at work. Unlike the previous chapters that emphasize the interaction
between personality and aspects of an organizations’ structure to explain
time conceptions, Ruiz-Ben argues that they need to be understood in terms
of the professionalism of different occupational fields. She demonstrates
 how macro-economic changes and the search for flexibility transform ed time
conceptions and professionalization of IT workers in Germany.
Ruiz-Ben’s analysis incorporates the global pressures of a high-speed
economy and the failure of Germ an education systems to keep up with these
competitive pressures, and shows how these macro-level factors interact
with the tem poral structure of the organization to undermine the profes­
sionalization of Germ an IT workers. In this study, rather than conscious
efforts on the part of cost-saving employers to de-skill expensive labor, it is
timing pressures from deadlines, shared through organizational networks
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that undermine expertise. The timing of software innovation within

those increasingly synchronized networks becomes ‘‘un-connected’’ to the
embedded expertise of IT workers. Expertise becomes routinized and resides
outside of the expert; what was once internalized expertise monopolized by
professional jurisdictions is now externalized and embedded in the dead­
lines, a com ponent of the tem poral structure of the organizations within
which IT work occurs. Ruiz-Ben demonstrates that these innovation proc­
esses and the development of software are shaped by both organizational
tem poral structures (particularly deadlines) and an enactment component as
Ballard (this volume) and Ballard and Seibold (2006) claim.

PART III: HOURS, SCHEDULES, AND FAMILIES

The chapters in this section move outside of the organization qua organ­
ization and include five papers from sociology and one from labor
economics that address the quantitative com ponent of workplace tem po­
ralities, how long and how hard people work and the factors m ost impli­
cated in those hours. In the context of this discussion, the authors address
the gendering of work time and w ork-fam ily balance (or lack thereof). M ost
of these papers, in one way or another, consider what is now known as the
‘‘hours debate,’’ the origins of which reside in the competing analysis of
Schor’s (1991) view of the overworked American and Robinson and
Godbey’s (1997) view of working-time stability. By and large, sociologists’
interest in time at work emerged from attempts to adjudicate the hours
debate and relate it to problems of work-fam ily balance and the gendered
division of labor.
The first of these papers by Maume and Purcell jumps into the debate
about the time bind and points to a glaring gap in that literature. R ather
than trying to resolve the debate about whether or not American workers
are really working longer, M aume and Purcell suggest that an issue of
 relevance that has received little attention is the speed or intensity of work.
Though M aum e and Purcell do not refer to the literature on time in
organizations discussed in the earlier parts of this chapter, their consider­
ation is with one of the key components of organizational structure - that is,
PACE. M aume and Purcell assess tem poral trends in work hours, the
determinants of these trends, and their relationship to the emergent flexible
economy. Their analysis connects the current economic restructuring to the
decline of the post-war accord and the emergent flexible economy that has
resulted in a weaker labor force (Rubin, 1995, 1996). It is in the context of a
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weakened union environment and the increased vulnerability of labor that

M aume and Purcell situate a new temporally bifurcated work force defined
by the overworked versus underemployed (Jacobs & Gerson, 2004).
M aum e and Purcell test competing explanations for work intensification
(objective economic forces versus cultural explanations) through analyses of
d ata from two representative samples of American employees (the 1977
Quality o f Employment Survey and the 1997 National Study o f the Changing
Workforce). Their results show intensification and that factors that predict
overwork also predict overpaced work. They also show that family friendly
workplaces are associated with less intensification. In order to better un­
derstand some of the estimated results, M aume and Purcell conduct year
specific models (1977 and 1997), then use those results to conduct a
decomposition analysis of work intensification, and estimate the objective
and subjective components of intensification. Their findings show both that
Americans are holding more complex jobs and that this complexity is
associated with intensification. Their findings also dem onstrate that those
seeking work-fam ily balance were increasingly successful in doing so, yet
that gender differences persist. M aum e and Purcell’s findings support the
hypotheses th at objective rather than subjective factors contribute the most
to intensification and that overworked Americans are also overpaced.
Reynolds and Aletraris build on their earlier work on hours mismatch
to ask how and why the relationships among intrinsic and extrinsic job
rewards, work-life conflict, and flexible hours are related to mismatch
between preferred and actual hours. They situate their query in the gap
between employees’ preferences to work fewer hours and employers’ prefe­
rences for employees to work more, particularly in high-commitment w ork­
places (Appelbaum, Bailey, Berg, & Kalleberg (1999)). Consistent with
arguments in Rubin and Brody (2005), they point to the increased im por­
tance of loyalty (a com ponent of commitment) in the new economy.
Reynolds and Aletraris analyze data from the 2002 National Study o f the
Changing Workforce to estimate OLS models that predict whether extrinsic,
 intrinsic rewards, work-life conflict, and flexible work hours affect hour
mismatches. Their m ajor contribution, however, is their subsequent
estimation of multivariate models of simultaneous equations showing how
the explanatory variables related to the actual and preferred hours are
responsible for hour mismatches. The results of their multivariate analyses
dem onstrate th at intrinsic rather than extrinsic rewards, gender and work-
life conflict are associated with hour mismatches. The results raise a number
of questions th at evoke other papers in this section. Their findings, for
example, are consistent with the argument that the costs of long hours are
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already too high (echoing some of the findings in the previous paper about
overpaced and overworked).
One of the long-standing implicit debates in m anagement literature is
whether or not workers want to avoid work. This debate has carried over
into sociological research on work. The findings here echo those of previous
studies that dem onstrate repeatedly (see, for example H odson’s (2001) meta
analysis of workplace ethnographies) that all things being equal, employees
do not necessarily w ant to work less, or in Reynolds and Aletraris’ words,
have a ‘‘diminished appetite for w ork.’’ Rather, employees who w ant to
reduce hours are in fact working more than are other groups. Flexible
scheduling can be, they argue, an effective solution to the problem of hour
mismatches for some employees. The results of their analyses are consistent
with those in the previous chapter that workers who are working long hours
are also working harder.
The possibilities for flexible scheduling are certainly one of the major
contributions to the altered temporalities of the contem porary era. While
scholars note that it is not always clear for whom the flexibility is arranged
and that there are certainly various types of flexibility (see Rubin, 1995, 1996
for summaries), there is little doubt that flexible scheduling provides
one possible strategy for managing work in a 24/7 economy, a topic the
following paper addresses directly.
Altman and Golden situate their analysis in a different contradiction than
do Reynolds and Aletraris. Here, the contradiction is between the obvious
(see above) benefits to both employers and employees for providing flexible
scheduling and its relative dearth. They develop an ‘‘enriched’’ conventional
model of the supply and dem and for flexible scheduling. Unlike m any of the
papers in this volume that are relatively atheoretical (in that they draw on,
but do not formally test, theory), descriptive and exploratory, Altm an and
Golden develop a formal theoretical model that strives to make sense of the
discrepancy between the supply and dem and for flex-time. They argue that
the economic structure of the economy and a firm’s technology could
 explain a firm’s ability to provide flex-time so that it is cost neutral. Altman
and Golden maintain, though, that economic restructuring does not explain
the persistence of excess dem and for flex-time, instead, they develop a model
in which the level and distribution of flex-time are an outcome of the techno­
logy and employee demand for flex-time.
Their model incorporates behavioral assumptions about efficiency wage
responses and suggests that despite the widespread benefits of flex-time, the
costs remain too high for firms. This conclusion points very directly to the
need for non-m arket intervention in the form of public policy that would
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encourage the supply of flex-time. Likewise, and this story has been told
before, increased bargaining power of workers is also likely to increase the
supply of flex-time. The issue of bargaining power and flex-time, surpris­
ingly, does not emerge in the following chapter that directly addresses some
of the conflicts or difficulties workers have in managing work and family
time.
Perrucci and MacDermid use qualitative data of workers’ discourse, and
subsequent quantitative analysis of survey data from the same blue-collar
workers in a 24/7 work environment, to develop a construct of three w ork­
place ‘‘times’’ in an approach that is very consistent with Ballard’s
‘‘chronemic’’ approach. As do the other studies in this volume, Perrucci
and M acDermid find that the meaning workers attach to the different work
times is connected to their ability to exercise control over them.
W orkers in the study identified ‘‘clock time,’’ those fixed chunks of
scheduled time, ‘‘family time,’’ viewed as interm ittent and discontinuous
and ‘‘work time,’’ defined as the subjective and relational forms of time.
Both types of data reveal some surprising findings: workers expressed
greater concern about how they spend family time than about how much
they have; clock time is so taken for granted that it is unrelated to job
attitudes such as job satisfaction, and they are m ost proactive about work
time. T hat is, employees perceive and experience work time in terms of
relations rather than quantities.
Their findings about family seem to contradict much of the spillover lite­
rature (see, for example, Mennino et al., 2005). These workers don’t have the
spilling of work and family concerns and demands that characterize profes­
sional and managerial parents on which much of the previous research focused.
This study suggests that there are real, often under-examined class differences
in how work-family issues emerge in the new 24/7 flexible economy (though see
Gerstel and her colleagues in this volume).
Gerstel, Clawson, and Huyser return directly to the issue of job hours in
another multi-method study of four gendered health care occupations
 (physicians, registered nurses, nursing assistants, and emergency medical
technicians (EMTs)). Just as Poster identified IT call center workers as
prototypical of the new economy, Gerstel and her colleagues view health
care as prototypical. Gerstel and her co-authors approach the hours debate
with a different set of explanations, here, considering gender and class, job
conditions and commitment, and family conditions as competing explana­
tions for long hours. One of the im portant contributions of this study to the
consideration of workplace temporalities is the explicit consideration of
class. Class is a factor left relatively unexamined in much of this literature,
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but th at is clearly an im portant com ponent of the consideration of how long

hours impact what are essentially hour mismatches (see Reynolds and
Aletraris, this volume).
Their examination of how hours differ within specific occupations in a
single industry is a real contribution of this chapter since it allows a more
precise explanation of how gender and class contribute to long hours. They
show th at all four occupations put in long hours but the explanations for
why they do so differ. Gender is im portant not within, but between jobs; as
previous studies have shown, they find the gender effect is in the structuring
of jobs (female jobs have longer hours). Their results indicate that of the
factors they consider, class is the m ost im portant determ inant of long hours.
Unlike previous papers in this volume, they find some support for Schor’s
(1991) explanation of long hours. People work long hours in order to make
enough money to support their lifestyle, though w hat that means is class
specific.
Their occupation specific analysis indicates that very different processes
generate long hours. Interestingly, while extrinsic rewards did not explain
mismatched hours in Reynolds and Aletraris, they do contribute to under­
standing long hours for these workers. The authors also point to the need
for research to consider the regulatory environment and its interaction with
class, a conclusion that is more similar than not to that Altm an and Golden
and Sweet and his co-authors (both in this volume) make. One of the many
im portant contributions this study makes is in illuminating the ways various
forms of data and analyses add to understanding and explaining workplace
temporalities.
Examining gendered jobs as Gerstel and her colleagues do captures one
way in which the persistence of gender differences informs the study of
workplace temporalities. Sayer addresses this concern more directly in her
study of gender differences in multi-tasking. Sayer analyzes gender differ­
ences in the am ount, type, and timing of m ulti-tasking and impact of w ork­
ing long hours and working non-standard hours on the intensity and timing
 of housework and childcare using data from the U.S. time-diary studies. Her
claim, much more explicit than in the other chapters that examine gender
and work time, is that time use is a fundamental aspect of the creation and
perpetuation of gender inequality. Women, Sayer argues, rely on m ulti­
tasking to squeeze more than 24 hours worth of work out of a day. She
conducts multivariate analyses of time-diary data to examine w hat many
qualitative studies suggest about sustained inequalities in the am ount and
quality of time women and men allocate to household and labor m arket
activities. Despite considerable economic transform ation and increased
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participation of women with young children in the labor force, the gendered
division of labor has persisted. One of the ways in which the ‘‘times’’ of
women and men have converged, however, is in the am ount of paid work
men and women do.
W hat Sayer’s analysis of the time-diary data reveal is that despite some
moves toward temporal convergence in some aspects of employment, there is
still considerable gender inequality in how employment is linked to non-paid
labor and how women and men structure their non-m arket work activities.
Her data show that mothers spend more time multi-tasking than fathers do;
likewise, they spend more time doing housework and childcare as the sole
activity. Observed gender differences are much larger for multi-tasking that
combines two household activities, rather than that which combines house­
hold with leisure or doing either housework or child care as the sole activity.
Her multivariate analysis of the data support the finding that women multi­
task more than men do and that that their multi-tasking activities are more
demanding and intense than are m en’s. Taken together, these studies, while
not completely putting the hours debate to rest, do present a fairly consistent
picture of men and women working increasingly hard and long, struggling to
manage the time available with varying degrees of satisfaction. Men and
women appear to be both overpaced and overworked with family lives en­
trained to work-life both of which lack sufficient flexibility.

PART IV: THE POSSIBLE WORLDS OF WORKPLACE

TEMPORALITIES

The last section presents two chapters that focus on insecurity, risk, and job
loss and one th at provides an applied, practical approach to solving some of
the dilemmas the other chapters raise. The final chapter, drawing on many
of the ideas in this volume and in the time literature more broadly, suggests
 new workplace temporalities and poses a num ber of possible directions for
future research.
The two chapters by Sweet et al. and R oot et al. focus different lenses on
workplace temporalities by considering the implications of an economy that
is characterized by instability and inconsistency in work time. Prior research
on the new economy has certainly dem onstrated the ways in which em­
ployment instability and insecurity alter the time horizons of careers; these
two studies contribute to our ability to see the hum an face of these m acro­
economic and organizational changes.
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In their multi-method study, Sweet, Moen, and Meiksins, using a life-

course perspective, analyze qualitative and survey data collected on middle
class and upper middle class professionals to explore how dual-earner cou­
ples negotiate the job insecurity of the new flexible economy that is char­
acterized by changing employment contracts, instability, and job loss. They
focus on employees who are at high risk of job loss or who might be at high
risk. A m ajor contribution of their study is the consideration of how dual­
career couples manage this risk, or perceived risk, together.
Their data contradict champions of the new economy and its proliferation
of opportunity for the well educated and highly skilled. Rather, the couples
that Sweet and his colleagues interviewed find it extremely difficult, if not
impossible, to find the time to plan careers in the new economy. The diffi­
culties of managing career and family make it extremely challenging to inure
themselves from risk, or productively prepare for it. Class is implicated in
their findings, though not in obvious ways. Instead of protecting or buff­
ering these families from the insecurities and costs of the current economy,
Sweet et al. point to the increased vulnerability of these families, who, be­
cause of their normative expectations of middle class jobs, fail to anticipate
and plan for their own potential job loss (this failure reappears below).5
M oreover, those who are m ost likely to have job security are also most
likely to experience difficulties balancing work and family (a finding that is
consistent with Gerstel et al., and M aume and Purcell, this volume). As do
Altm an and Golden, Sweet et al. suggest that policy intervention is neces­
sary to resolve some of the m ost difficult aspects of economic restructuring.
Root, Root, and Sundin, describe less privileged, but equally vulnerable
workers, who, despite a different class position and occupations that might
have been more secure, are similarly unprepared for the disruption and costs
of displacement. R oot and his colleagues collected descriptive qualitative
d ata on the displacement of school teachers in M innesota. The focus on job
loss of these workers is interesting because they should be fairly privileged in
the knowledge economy.
 Despite differences in status and earnings, the similarities between these
teachers and the dual-earner professionals in the previous chapter are strik­
ing. They are similarly unprepared for the risk associated with the contem­
porary economy. For different reasons, both groups assumed they were
relatively protected from job loss. Though R oot and his co-authors do not
make the point, it is also clear that the life-course framing that Sweet et al.
use would be particularly useful for analyzing the data R oot et al. present.
The teachers R oot and his colleagues interview, for example, express con­
siderable dismay that increases depending on where they are in their careers.
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Well-experienced teachers are particularly distraught at the betrayal they

perceive in their lay offs. Thus, far more than the economic costs, it’s the
timing in their life-course that creates the distress.
The third chapter in this section, rather than presenting a grim view of
contem porary career timing and workplace temporalities, provides a prom ­
ising and positive proscription for surviving the transition to a 24/7 econ­
omy, family and all. Drawing on Gewirtz’s consulting practice and Fried’s
previous research, Gewirtz and Fried describe and present a case study of
how a company can make a ‘‘paradigmatic shift’’ and become ‘‘life-
friendly.’’ They provide an account of how a company for whom Gewirtz
consulted responded both to a crisis and the need to alter the temporal
structure of the work place to adapt to a 24/7 economy. Gewirtz and Fried
use a case study of an Organizational Development process that Gewirtz
helped a company use to develop ‘‘life-friendly’’ policies. They then provide
the reader with a clear-cut guide by which such a change can be imple­
mented. Admittedly, in the case they present, the first author had developed
a long-standing relationship with the company and one wonders about the
difficulties of affecting such a change more broadly (though no one would
argue its desirability). This chapter demonstrates the ways in which research
on workplace temporalities can be used to inform workplace policy to create
a positive sum-relationship for employers, employees, and families.
The final chapter in this volume suggests that there is a new tim e-work
discipline th at embodies many of the factors to which others allude. The
transition to a 24/7 global, technologically mediated world has had enor­
mous implications for technological development and use, organizational
structures and, I argue, employees’ tim e-w ork discipline. In the final chap­
ter, I develop the construct of layered-task time and suggest a series of
propositions th at link layered-task time to organizational structure. I hy­
pothesize th at layered-task time is the successor to clock time; like clock
time, there is still the pressure to accomplish as much as possible in any
given am ount of time, but unlike clock time, the task not the clock
 structures the am ount of time. Moreover, polychronic structuring of work
activities becomes embedded in the organization’s structure, and workers
engage in simultaneous, fragmented activities that are layered on each other,
often characterized by inconsistent skill demands. Out of this new time
emerges a new time sense. The arguments in this chapter are informed by
the multi-disciplinary inquiry into time at work and in organizations and,
I hope, will generate future research.

SUMMARY
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The chapters in this volume, drawing from a variety of disciplines, using an

assortm ent of methods and data sources, all point to the complexities of
workplace temporalities in the new economy and suggest that incorporating
inquiry about time will inform understanding of the contem porary w ork­
place. The chapters in this volume explore a wide range of topics that
illuminate the mechanisms by which macro-economic, in fact global, eco­
nomic change are linked to organizational and individual-level experience.
Similarly, the research in this volume demonstrates the utility not only of a
multi-method approach, but also of a multi-disciplinary approach to
understanding workplace temporalities. Clearly, there is much sociologists
can learn from incorporating the insights, findings, and theories originating
in other social sciences.
While much of the work herein remains at the level of description and
exploration, one goal of this volume is to generate further theory develop­
ment and explanatory research. Future research could build on the insights,
findings, and observations of the authors here and could add some of the
central concerns sociologists have with power and inequality. For example,
many of the chapters in this volume tend to ignore the structural barriers,
and power asymmetries that characterize the workplace relationships. The
literature based on I/O psychology might better incorporate some of those
factors. Likewise, while sociologists often begin with assumptions of struc­
tured inequalities, they tend to ignore some of the im portant individual
factors that explain some of the outcomes of interest.
The research here suggests that understanding of widespread social
change requires sustained inquiry into time use, time experience, and time
sense at work since much of non-work activities are entrained to work
activities. Individuals internalize habits of a new economy, develop a time
sense shaped by long hours, overpaced and layered activities. They do so,
however, in a larger political economy that is still too often structured by the
 norms, priorities, schedules, routines, rhythms, and pace, that is, the tem ­
poral cultures and structures of m odern not post-modern, global, 24/7
economy. The lag between policy and the tem poral structures and cultures
of contem porary work leave too many people in a distorted tem poral com­
mons (Bluedorn & Waller, 2006) in which the dance of life is out of step.

NOTES
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1. See, fo r instance, th e recent issues o f Sociology o f W o rk and Occupations (2001),

A m erican B ehavioral Scientist (2001), A ca d e m y o f M an a g em en t Journal (2001), A ca d em y
o f M an a g em en t R eview (2001), A ca d e m y o f M ana g em en t Journal, O ct, (2003), a n d recent
collections b y F u c h s-E p ste in a n d K a lle b erg (2004).
2. T h e sp ecial issues o f se v e ra l so c ial science jo u rn a ls lis te d in n o te 1 a b o v e evince
g re a te r in q u iry in to m o re m e s o -a s p e c ts o f te m p o ra lity a n d o rg a n iz a tio n s.
3. I w o u ld a rg u e , th o u g h , t h a t in so m e in stan c es, w h a t re se a rc h e rs call c u ltu re , is
re ally a n a sp e c t o f s tru c tu re as I d iscu ss b e lo w in C h a p te r 17 (see, fo r in sta n c e ,
S c h rib e r & G u te k , 1987; B e n a b o u , 1999).
4. T h o u g h th e re is d e b a te o n th is c o u n t; see, fo r e x am p le R o b in s o n a n d G o d b e y ,
1997; v e rsu s S c h o r, 1991.
5. I a m c e rta in ly n o t b la m in g th e v ictim in m a k in g th is o b se rv a tio n , sim ply
p o in tin g to o n e o f th e c o n tra d ic tio n s o f class in th e n ew eco n o m y .

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank R andy H odson for inviting me to contribute this
volume to the series, Research in the Sociology of Work. I also thank Charles
J. Brody, Jennifer Troyer, and Allen Bluedorn for their helpful comments
on some of the chapters in this volume. I am also grateful to Linda
Bresnahan for her assistance during the ‘‘crunch time.’’

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