Capacity Utilisation, Working Time and the Quality of Work

Enrique Fernandez-Macias and Rafael Muñoz Bustillo Llorente
Additional contact information
Rafael Muñoz Bustillo Llorente: University of Salamanca

Chapter 7 in Comparative Analyses of Operating Hours and Working Times in the European Union, 2009, pp 165-189 from Springer

Abstract: Human beings face a double restriction in relation to time and its use. Firstly, time is clearly the ultimate scarce resource; there are only 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week and 52 weeks in a year. Although there are activities that can be done simultaneously, such as listening to the radio and cooking, generally speaking the time we devote to something, to work for example, has to be taken out of other activities, such as raising a family, or enjoying a film. Each person faces, therefore, an opportunity cost in terms of time in every activity he or she does. Secondly, human beings are social animals and the use of time is socially modelled. Since history has been recorded, men and women have coordinated their activities in order to work during certain hours, and rest and amuse themselves at other times; for historical and cultural reasons, using the words of the Ecclesiastes, “to everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven”. Some of these patterns of time use are biologically determined (circadian cycle, night and day, etc.), while others are explained by cultural factors. Throughout history, the amount of time used to perform productive activities has followed an inverted U shape, rising with the arrival of agriculture and husbandry and even further with the coming of the industrial age, reaching a maximum at the end of the 18th century, and diminishing since then. So generally speaking, we can say that nowadays workers in high income countries devote less time to work than a century ago. But along with this process of reduction of working time, according to many analysts the last few decades have witnessed a slow process of destandardisation of working time.1 The once dominant rigid distribution of time between work, leisure and rest, represented by the “9 to 5” job, has become less common.2 If we assume that the old time system of coordination of activities, so as to have most people doing the same things (working, resting, amusing themselves) at the same time, had a rationality based on individual and social preferences, this change will have an impact on the work-life balance of workers.

Keywords: Shift Work; Working Time; Night Shift; Capacity Utilisation; European Foundation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:conchp:978-3-7908-2185-7_7

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783790821857

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-7908-2185-7_7

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Contributions to Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().