Working Time. Theory and Policy Implications (original) (raw)

WORKING TIME, LABOUR PRODUCTIVITY AND WORKING TIME ORGANIZATION – NEW (OR OLD) CHALLENGES 1

Modern labour market imposes flexibility as an essential prerequisite for success but organizational productivity depends mostly on its employees who usually strive for security. This paper examine the organization of working time and that which is considered " normal exertion " in eight continental counties of Croatia in order to determine work intensity, the most frequent model of working time organization, the position of employees, as well as the position of Croatian labour legislation in terms of contemporary challenges and trends.

Working Time, Industrial Relations and the Employment Relationship

Time & Society, 2005

This article explores the erosion of the standard working-time model associated with the UK's voluntarist system of industrial relations, and argues that its renegotiation is likely to be a critical factor in shaping the employment relationship of the future. As numerous studies over the last two decades have revealed, organizations have increasingly seen ‘time’ as a variable that can be manipulated to increase productivity or expand service provision, through making workers work harder, longer or according to management demands. These studies have also drawn our attention to the wider consequences of the increasing demands that organizations place on their employees in the name of ‘flexibility’, impacting both on what workers do while at work and how they organize and plan the other aspects of their lives. This article brings together two literatures, one on time and the other on industrial relations, and suggests that new working-time arrangements are changing the wage-effort ...

Reduction in working hours: a policy analysis

From 50s to 90s there was a double trend: labour productivity was rising and, meanwhile, working time has been reduced. During the last two decades the latter process ended. Feasibility and effects of a policy of working hours reduction are the core of the paper, and to analyse them we studied Employment, income, happiness are all variables influenced by changes in working time; unfortunately economic debate does not give a univocal relationship: econometrics results show ambiguous correlations. All this review work is valorised in the last part when we improve a model present in literature adding the analysis of utility through a CES function.

Working time regimes: A panel discussion on continuing problems

German Journal of Human Resource Management: Zeitschrift für Personalforschung

This article records a panel discussion at the Organizational Working Time Regimes conference on 31 March 2017 at the University of Graz, Austria. The discussion was moderated by Sara Louise Muhr and the panelists were Jana Costas, Susanne Ekman, Laura Empson and Dan Kärreman. The discussion both departed from yet centred on the concept of time itself: how we understand time as academics, employees and managers, and how the notion of time guides and controls all of us in various ways. Through the different perspectives that the panelists have on time and work regimes, it became evident that time – and discussions of time – is complex and context-dependent and needs to be researched as such. The discussion passionately weaved in and out of key questions on work intensification, inequality regimes and resistance to working time regimes that are deeply entwined with dynamic dialectics such as personal/professional, past/future, individual/organizational, worker/leader, good/bad. The pa...