“Busyness” plainly relates to externally observable work or leisure activities, but nevertheless the state itself is entirely subjective. I will argue in what follows, that there may have been fundamental changes in the connection between the external circumstances of work and leisure and internal feelings of “busyness”. Through the last century there have been fundamental shifts in the relationship between the pattern of daily activities, and patterns of societal sub- and superordination. “Are you busy?” may have had a quite different (...) meaning as addressed to an upwardly mobile member of the Victorian English or American middle classes, as compared to an office worker at the turn of the third millennium. Individuals’ representations of their states of “busyness” play an important, and changing, role in establishing their positions in the order of social stratification. A leisure class at the end of the 19th century perhaps, but the dominant groups in the early 21st are in the most straightforward sense of the word, workers. I will suggest that, reflecting this fundamental shift in social structure, the social construction of “busyness” has also changed. (shrink)

This article argues that annual hours per employed person and per working-age person capture important dimensions of political-economic success that should be weighed against aggregate employment and wealth patterns. It also argues that partisan-driven work-time policies and welfare-regime institutions give rise to diverging Social Democratic, Liberal, and Christian Democratic “worlds” of work time in terms of these two measures. Descriptive statistics for eighteen Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries reveal broad clustering and trends suggestive of the Three Worlds, while (...) panel estimation suggests the influence of partisan and welfare-institutional conditions underlying them. Case study of Finland, the United States, and the Netherlands further illustrates the political process and sequence of the Three Worlds. (shrink)

In the context of change to the “new modernity” described in Beck’s work, companies develop management modes and methods that focus more and more on individuals. Constitutive of the individualization process, human resources practices have become ambivalent as the process itself. This contribution examines how a managerial and organizational innovation as telework contributes to the process of individualization, and the paradoxes it addresses to management. At the interface of the social and the technical, teleworking appears as a flexible arrangement, meeting (...) employees’ and employer’s demands – which is a characteristic of the process of individualization – by simultaneously fragmenting collectivity, exposing individuals to social risk, and producing exclusion. The authors focus on two consecutive paradoxes of such individualized managerial practices: the individual–collective dilemma and the autonomy–control paradox. Finally, the paper reveals HRM as a new institution of individualization in a world where regulation functions are more and more transferred to individuals themselves. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Definition of the problem: The regulation of residents' work hours involves several ethical conflicts which need to be systematically analysed and evaluated. Arguments and conclusion: The most important ethical principle when regulating work hours is to avoid the harm resulting from the over‐work of physicians and from an excessive division of labour. Additionally, other ethical principles have to be taken into account, in particular the principles of nonmaleficence and beneficence for future patients and for physicians. The article presents arguments (...) for balancing the relevant ethical principles and analyses the structural difficulties that occur unavoidably in any regulation of the complex activities of physicians. (shrink)

In The Great Transformation Karl Polyani argues that we have transitioned from being a society with islands of market life to a market with islands of society. As the market has grown, so too, I would argue, has market culture. In this essay, I argue that the modern family is itself one such “society” within the market, and that it is under pressure to incorporate aspects of market culture. It responds to this pressure by resisting, capitulating to or simply playing (...) with it through an ongoing process of symbolization and re-symbolization. The degree to which families resist or welcome market culture depends, I think, on the fit between individuals’ embrace of market culture and their orientation to time. Temporal strategies preferred by employees at the top of the corporate ladders pose market culture’s first port of entry into the home. Or to put it another way, market culture slips into the family through a crack on the edge of the time bind. (shrink)