The Coming of the 24-hour Economy?

Changing work schedules in Belgium between 1966 and 1999

Ignace Glorieux, Inge Mestdag and Joeri Minnen

ABSTRACT. This study mapped the changes in the timing of working hours in Belgium as reported in workers' daily work schedules, obtained from the Belgian Time-Use Surveys of 1966 and 1999. A typology of working schedules was drawn up by means of a sequence analysis. This approach showed that work performed beyond the standard times, that is, in the evening, at night, or on weekends, did not grow in importance in the intervening years. In 1999, standard working hours clearly accounted for a larger share of the work schedules of the active population. Although the analyses did certainly not corroborate the often alleged trend towards a 24hour society in Belgium, it could be shown that certain categories of the working population are more susceptible to flexible working hours than others. KEY WORDS • Belgium • non-standard work times • sequence analysis • time-use study • work schedules

The Coming of a 24-hour Society?

In the second half of the 20th century, Belgium, like the rest of Western Europe and several other countries (e.g. Canada and Australia), witnessed a steady reduction in the number of working hours [START_REF] Lallement | La fine di un tempo? Flessibilità e differenziazione del tempo sociale in Francia' (The end of an area? Flexibility and differentiation in social time in France)[END_REF][START_REF] Alesina | Work and Leisure in the U.S. and Europe: Why So Different? Working paper series[END_REF]. For the USA, there is some evidence that, during the same period, the number of working hours remained stable [START_REF] Presser | Working in a 24/7 Economy: Challenges for American Families[END_REF]. In Belgium, the decrease in working hours, from 45 to 38 hours a week between 1956 and 2001, was enacted by statutory laws [START_REF] Maes | De werkdag: de geschiedenis van de strijd voor arbeidsduurvermindering[END_REF]. The early 1980s are generally recognized as a turning point in legislation concerning the length of the work week, as stronger emphasis was placed on work schedules while calls for a reduction in the number of work hours faded into the background. In other European countries as well, the topic of flexible working hours received high political priority during the last two decades of the 20th century (Strazdins et al., 2006). The flexibilization and individualization of the work schedule were increasingly considered as tools to improve economic competitiveness [START_REF] Lallement | La fine di un tempo? Flessibilità e differenziazione del tempo sociale in Francia' (The end of an area? Flexibility and differentiation in social time in France)[END_REF]. In Western Europe, the historic labour agreements that had been achieved by social partners in the preceding decades lost ground and, as a result, the temporal structuring of work schedules gradually lost its universal and rigid character [START_REF] Garhammer | Changes in Working Hours in Germany: The Resulting Impact on Every Day Life[END_REF]. Since the early 1980s, regulations concerning work time together with welfare-state policies have been reformed in most European countries. The promotion of new social arrangements has been aimed at making economic and labour markets more flexible [START_REF] Fagan | The Temporal Reorganization of Employment and the Household Rhythm of Work Schedules: The Implications for Gender and Class Relations[END_REF]. In many countries, the flexibilization of work times has been recognized on a judiciary basis [START_REF] Lallement | La fine di un tempo? Flessibilità e differenziazione del tempo sociale in Francia' (The end of an area? Flexibility and differentiation in social time in France)[END_REF][START_REF] Masson | Temps de travail flexible et contrainte de disponibilité. Le cas des vendeuses en grands magasins dans la région Suisse Romande' (Flexible working times and and obligation to be available. The case of saleswomen in large stores in the region of Roman Switzerland[END_REF][START_REF] Alis | From Gods to Goddesses: Horai Management as an Approach to Coordinating Working Hours[END_REF]. In Belgium, a collective agreement and a statutory law was passed in 1987 enabling companies to introduce new work schedules that relaxed the restrictions on night-time and Sunday work. This changing legislation has frequently been implicated as the starting point for a 24-hour society and economy, in which 'round-the-clock' production and consumption are increasingly considered as normal practices [START_REF] Garhammer | Changes in Working Hours in Germany: The Resulting Impact on Every Day Life[END_REF][START_REF] Allan | Non-standard Working-time Arrangements in Australia and New Zealand[END_REF][START_REF] Breedveld | The Double Myth of Flexibilization: Trends in Scattered Work Hours, and Differences in Time-sovereignty[END_REF][START_REF] Masson | Temps de travail flexible et contrainte de disponibilité. Le cas des vendeuses en grands magasins dans la région Suisse Romande' (Flexible working times and and obligation to be available. The case of saleswomen in large stores in the region of Roman Switzerland[END_REF][START_REF] Golden | Flexible Work Schedules: What Are We Trading Off to Get Them?[END_REF].

Generally speaking, the 24-hour society is believed to be driven by exogenous or macro-level factors [START_REF] Allan | Non-standard Working-time Arrangements in Australia and New Zealand[END_REF][START_REF] Hamermesh | The Timing of Work over Time[END_REF][START_REF] Masson | Temps de travail flexible et contrainte de disponibilité. Le cas des vendeuses en grands magasins dans la région Suisse Romande' (Flexible working times and and obligation to be available. The case of saleswomen in large stores in the region of Roman Switzerland[END_REF][START_REF] Baker | The Impact of Different Rosters on Employee Work and Non-work Time Preferences[END_REF][START_REF] Presser | Work Shifts in a 24/7 Service Economy: Facing the Challenges[END_REF]. Flexibilization and destandardization have often been understood as ways to accommodate changes in technology and the global market [START_REF] Garhammer | Changes in Working Hours in Germany: The Resulting Impact on Every Day Life[END_REF]. The spread of information and communication technologies (ICT), along with a globalizing economy, have made it necessary for international companies to run 24 hours a day in order to respond and deliver (just) in time, to compete with different time zones, or to stay in contact with branch offices in different locations all over the world. Thus, besides the technical factor there is also the organizational factor. International competition in a poorly protected market demands that enterprises convert to flexible work-time arrangements [START_REF] Lallement | La fine di un tempo? Flessibilità e differenziazione del tempo sociale in Francia' (The end of an area? Flexibility and differentiation in social time in France)[END_REF]. In order to maximize profits on capital investments, employers will seek to extend operating times. For employers, the wage costs of shift work are lower than overtime payments to day workers, as there are strict rules on how to compensate workers for overtime (e.g. financial compensation and extra days off).

Another key element in the demand for more flexible work-time arrangements is the noticeable growth of the service sector, which in the last few decades has become the largest segment of many economies [START_REF] Presser | Working in a 24/7 Economy: Challenges for American Families[END_REF]. Due to the preponderance of service work, the temporal boundaries instituted by industrial society are being questioned. Consequently, there is increasing interest in extended shopping and service hours. The remarkable expansion of the recreation and entertainment industries has also accelerated the need for paid evening, night-time, and weekend work, as the desynchronization of social time implies that free time for some becomes the work time of others [START_REF] Lallement | La fine di un tempo? Flessibilità e differenziazione del tempo sociale in Francia' (The end of an area? Flexibility and differentiation in social time in France)[END_REF]. This macro-economic factor favouring a 24-hour society is therefore also related to changes in the supply side of the labour market.

The growth of the service economy goes hand in hand with women's participation in the labour market, and these trends are mutually reinforcing. While women are easily employable within the service economy, their engagement in paid labour increases the demand for services and commodities, since part of what was formerly produced at home is purchased instead. The increasing number of dual-income families has strengthened purchasing power, but there are fewer opportunities to go out and buy goods and services during normal working hours. This, in turn, enhances the demand for extending the business hours of services and shops [START_REF] Presser | Work Shifts in a 24/7 Service Economy: Facing the Challenges[END_REF].

On the supply side of the labour market, demand for more flexible hours is also rising. Individualization, the emphasis on individual autonomy, and the numerous problems resulting from the individual's need to manage his or her time in a high-pressure society underline the need for work-time autonomy. In this respect, time sovereignty is an important factor since more temporal sovereignty leads to more temporal flexibility [START_REF] Glorieux | Moeder, wanneer werken wij? Arbeidsmarktconclusies uit het Vlaams tijdsbestedingsonderzoek 1988-1999[END_REF]. Employees with more time sovereignty work longer days than employees with no or less time sovereignty and are therefore more likely than 'regular' full timers to carry out some of their paid work at non-standard times, such as in the evening or during the weekend [START_REF] Dixon | Working Time Patterns in New Zealand in the 1990s[END_REF].

The temporal organization of work is a lively topic in many European countries and in the USA (Hinrichs et al., 1991;[START_REF] Boulin | A Major Change in Working Time[END_REF][START_REF] Breedveld | The Double Myth of Flexibilization: Trends in Scattered Work Hours, and Differences in Time-sovereignty[END_REF]. The development of a 24-hour society has been mostly inferred from figures on the increasing number of people who work non-standard hours [START_REF] Presser | Nonstandard Work Schedules and Marital Instability[END_REF]. Current population study data have shown that there has been a gradual trend towards a non-standard work day and work week in the USA. Results from the European Labour Force Survey (ELFS) also revealed that a substantial percentage of workers are employed during non-standard work times [START_REF] Evans | Trends in Working Hours in OECD Countries[END_REF]. The ELFS included data on employees who 'usually' work in shifts, during the evening, the night, or on Saturdays or Sundays. In 1998, 12.6 per cent of the Belgian active population usually worked during the evening, which is a somewhat smaller proportion than in most other European countries. For night-time work, Belgium ranked in the middle, with 5.2 per cent of its workers employed at night. According to the ELFS, Belgium had the lowest percentage of Saturday workers (only 18.8%) and it also ranked in the bottom three countries for Sunday work (9.6%). Finally, 16.5 per cent of Belgium's workers were engaged in shift work, which is relatively high for that type of work. Overall, the data suggested that the Nordic countries had the most flexible workforce in Europe. Finland scored high for work during the evening (26.8%) and night (9.8%). Finland (18.6%) and Denmark (20%) led all other European countries studied with respect to Sunday work, while Finland (24.5%) and Sweden (25.2%) had higher rates of shift work. Southern European countries, including Italy (39.6%) and Spain (36.3%), had the highest percentages for work on Saturdays.

Although the USA is generally considered to be the 24-hour society par excellence, the organization of work in Belgium and other European countries appears to be moving in that direction. Despite this general belief, there has been little scientific research on the topic. As far as labour market conditions are concerned, similar demographic and economic trends can be discerned in Belgium as in the USA, but these do not necessarily result in a similar increase in non-standard working schedules. In this study, we put the thesis of the '24hour society' to the test by comparing working hours in Belgium in 1966 and 1999. The former may rightly be considered as the apogee of the standardization of labour legislation, while the trend towards flexibilization is often believed to have culminated at the end of the 20th century.

Time-use Data to Map Historical Changes in the Organization of Work

Changes in work schedule arrangements were determined from data derived from two time-use studies (TUS). TUS meticulously register people's daily time use and are therefore suitable to map societal changes. The flexibilization of work schedules has mostly been inferred from questionnaire data; however, to ascertain the importance of work performed outside standard working hours, information other than workers' subjective assessment of the type of shift they work is needed [START_REF] Hamermesh | The Timing of Work over Time[END_REF][START_REF] Dragstra | How Many Hours Do You Usually Work? An Analysis of the Working Hours Questions in 26 Large-scale Surveys in 6 Countries and the European Union[END_REF]. Time-use data allow the different times throughout the day at which paid work is carried out to be very accurately identified. As a result, not only the prevalence of night or weekend work, but also the prevalence of work during the fringes of the working day, that is, early in the morning or later in the evening, can be assessed [START_REF] Allan | Non-standard Working-time Arrangements in Australia and New Zealand[END_REF]. Moreover, time-use data from different years could prove to be very useful in analyses of social changes from a historical perspective. This is of particular relevance since work-time arrangements are often investigated by means of highly different measures, which hinders chronological comparisons [START_REF] Presser | Working in a 24/7 Economy: Challenges for American Families[END_REF]. The time-use data that form the basis of this study were gathered in 1966 and 1999. The Belgian time-budget study of 1966 was part of the Multinational Comparative Time-Budget Research Project, 1 in which 2077 Belgians, between 19 and 65 years of age, kept a one-day diary. The second national TUS in Belgium was conducted in 1999 by the National Institute for Statistics, following EUROSTAT guidelines (Eurostat, 2000;[START_REF] Glorieux | uur…Belgische tijd. Een onderzoek naar de tijdsbesteding van de Belgen[END_REF]. In that survey, 8382 Belgians between the ages of 12 and 95 years and representing 4275 households kept a diary on two days: one weekday (Monday through Friday) and one weekend day (Saturday or Sunday). In order to make both datasets representative for the entire Belgian population for the respective years, the data were weighted. 2 The 1966 dataset included time-use and questionnaire information from 1345 working respondents. The 1999 dataset consisted of time-use and questionnaire information from 1866 working respondents.

The questionnaire and time-use data from both datasets were standardized to a common format and merged. For purposes of comparison, only information from respondents between 19 and 65 years of age were retained and only one respondent per household was selected from the 1999 dataset. The resulting merged database comprising data from 1966 and 1999 provided a unique record for studying changes in work patterns in the last trimester of 20th-century Belgium, although the restricted background variables in both studies confines investigations into the effect of structural changes between the two years.

Working During Non-standard Hours: Changes between 1966 and 1999

In order to study deviations from standard working hours, the definition of standard must be clearly established. Here, we distinguished between four types of non-standard work times: (1) evening work, from 7:00 pm till 10:00 pm on any day of the week; (2) night work, from 10:00 pm till 6:00 am on any day of the week; (3) Saturday work, from 6:00 am till 7:00 pm on Saturdays; and (4) Sunday work, from 6:00 am till 7:00 pm on Sundays. Standard work times refer to weekdays between 6:00 am and 7:00 pm and thus corresponds to a work week of 65 hours, or 38.7 per cent of a week. Non-standard times correspond to 103 hours, or 61.3 per cent of a week. Night time comprises the largest share of nonstandard work times. 3 Table 1 shows that the share of standard work time increased in Belgium after 1966. In contrast to what is often believed, the share of work performed during non-standard work times decreased from 19.6 to 13.8 per cent in the last third of the 20th century. In 1999, more than 86 per cent of the total work time in Belgium occurred between 6:00 am and 7:00 pm, on Mondays through Fridays. Night-time and evening work were the exceptions in both research years. The smaller share of working hours beyond standard times was due to the decrease in Saturday work, from 9.2 to 4.3 per cent. Work on Saturday morning was common in Belgium until the early 1970s, when the 45-hour week assumed an 8-hour work day from Monday to Friday and another 5 hours on Saturday morning. This was corroborated by the 1966 time-use dataset, in which the average work time on Saturdays was reported to be 4h30'. The five-day work week was instituted gradually, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such that a 40-hour work week became reality for almost all workers in 1975 [START_REF] Maes | De werkdag: de geschiedenis van de strijd voor arbeidsduurvermindering[END_REF]. Table 1 further establishes that in both years Sunday was considered as a rest day. Since Sunday work was forbidden by law in 1905, it became and has remained an exceptional practice. Figure 1 corroborates the findings provided in Table 1. This tempogram shows the proportion of the active population that actually worked at any given moment of the week (from Monday till Friday). The figure clearly illustrates the absence of an expansion of work during non-standard working times. More people were engaged in paid work at the same time in 1966 than in 1999. This holds true for the mornings as well as the afternoons. The reason for this may be the increase in the number of holidays and statutory holidays and the surge in part-time employment as a result of the entry of women into the labour market.

A Typology of Work Schedules on Weekdays

The average tempogram, as exemplified in Figure 1, may conceal several different patterns of work schedules. To gain further insight into the changing character of work schedules during weekdays, we identified sub-rhythms within the collective work schedule. Individuals with similar work schedules on a particular work day were therefore identified by sequence analysis and grouped together in order to create a typology of work schedules that applied to the combined active working populations of 1966 and 1999.

In this approach, only active respondents who filled out a time-budget diary for a weekday and registered at least 10 minutes of paid work on that day were eligible for inclusion. 4 Accordingly, the study was based on data from 964 respondents in 1966 and 1472 in 1999. The aim of sequence analysis is to assess the difference between individual sequences, in this case individual work schedules, by means of distance. This type of sequence analysis is called the dynamic Hamming distance analysis and was designed by Richard [START_REF] Hamming | Error-detecting and Error-correcting Codes[END_REF], who defined the distance between two sequences as the number of substitutions required to convert one sequence into another. Substitutions assume that one value is replaced by another, leaving the temporal structure of the sequence untouched. This approach is ideal for finding contemporaneous similarities [START_REF] Lesnard | Optimal Matching and Social Sciences[END_REF]. However, in order to detect similar work schedules, the analysis must take into account more than just the number of work to non-work substitutions necessary to equate work-day schedules since some substitutions are more probable than others, given their timing. The cost of substituting work by non-work or vice versa 'should reflect the likelihood, proximity, of two events occurring at the same time' (Lesnard, 2005: 11). As work is much more probable than non-work at 11 o'clock in the morning, a substitution by nonwork will entail a high substitution cost. Conversely, as many people stop working between 4 and 5 pm in the afternoon, work and non-work are equally prevalent, which is reflected in a low substitution cost. 5 The dynamic Hamming distance procedure, performed using SAS, results in a dissimilarity list containing the distances between all possible pairs of sequences. This dissimilarity list was read into Clustan Graphics to distinguish between various clusters. Twelve clusters were thus established, 6 analogous to the study of work schedules in France by [START_REF] Lesnard | Optimal Matching and Social Sciences[END_REF]. Not only was the number of clusters manageable, but, as the following analysis shows, this typology allowed for adequate variation while preserving most of the original information. Moreover, the best validation for a cluster solution is the fact that the groups are quite homogeneous with regard to background characteristics, that is, characteristics not taken into account when the clusters were constructed (Table 2). Mean sequences were constructed to reflect the typical behaviour of a cluster. The mean sequence of a cluster is the sequence with the smallest average distance to all other sequences in the same cluster. It allows horizontal visualization of the homogeneity within a cluster. In this study, the mean sequence provided a general idea of the work times included within a particular cluster. Mean sequences were retrieved through a calculation provided in the statistical software package SPSS. To describe the clusters in general, tempograms were used. These display the vertical homogeneity of activities within the classes and the share of respondents in a given cluster who are engaged in work at a given moment of the work day. The tempograms presented in Figure 2 take into account both research years to the same extent. In addition, the clusters were characterized on the basis of calculations of the average duration of work per cluster and the share of the total work performed during non-standard times (between midnight and 6:00 am and between 7:00 pm and midnight).

The 12 clusters were grouped into five types of work schedules: standard work days, long work days, shift work, part-time arrangements and fragmented work schedules. In both research years, standard work schedules accounted for the majority of work schedules. Moreover, this percentage increased between 1966 and 1999 due to the considerable growth of the typical 9-to-5 work schedule. The 8-to-4 work schedule also became somewhat more prevalent, and the average 8-to-4 work day shortened from 8h49' to 8h12'. By contrast, the prevalence of the long version of the standard work day (9-to-6) decreased. Of the respondents with standard work schedules, almost no work (< 1%) was performed during non-standard times. Thus, in general, the prevalence of the Conversely, long work days were more exceptional in 1999 than in 1966. Both the 8-to-8 work day and the long work day extending into the evening became less common in Belgium during the study period. The average duration of work on long work days decreased, although the decrease was only significant regarding the evening extension. On long working days, about 12 per cent of the total work time was performed during non-standard hours. When a long work day was extended into the evening, the percentage of non-standard working hours increased to account for one-quarter of the daily hours worked.

Shift work was also less prevalent in 1999 than in 1966, although the decline was statistically not significant. The average duration of a morning shift was significantly shorter in 1999, while the average durations of afternoon and night shifts did not change significantly. The morning shift was characterized by a small percentage of total working hours occurring during non-standard hours. One-third of the total work time of people employed in afternoon shifts was performed during non-standard hours, mostly in the evening. Those working night shifts had the highest percentage (96%) of total work time occurring beyond standard times.

Due to the large number of part-time work arrangements, short working days have become more widespread. Nonetheless, in this study, the increase affected morning employment only, while the percentage of respondents engaged in afternoon part-time employment remained stable. The average duration of an afternoon part-time job also decreased significantly between 1966 and 1999. There was a significant decrease in the percentage of total work performed during non-standard times by workers with part-time morning employment, while a trend in the opposite direction was determined for part-time afternoon employment.

Finally, two types of fragmented work schedules could be distinguished. The first one consisted of a large amount of work performed before noon, followed by a long break in the early afternoon, and a recommencement of work in the later afternoon until the evening. In this pattern, the average number of working hours was lower and a smaller share of those working hours was performed beyond the standard time. Contrary to popular belief, this type of fragmented working pattern did not grow in importance. The second type of fragmented timetable was the fragmented late work day. From an analysis of the mean sequence, it was clear that this schedule was centred on evening work hours, although the tempogram showed a second, smaller peak around noon. Workers in this cluster performed a large share (more than 70%) of their total work in the evening and at night; for example, a person working as a cashier, waitress, or in some other service-related job that demands the employee's presence when most other workers are off. In this respect, it was useful to examine the relation-ship between a respondent's work schedule and other characteristics of his or her job.

Different Work Schedules for Different Types of Employment?

One of the reasons for the expected increase in work during non-standard times was the expanded participation of women in the labour market during the study period. Between 1961 and 1999, the activity rate of Belgian women aged 15 to 64 increased from 26.7 to 50.4 per cent. 7 The time-use data corroborated this trend: in 1966 only 29.3 per cent of the active population consisted of women, whereas in 1999 women comprised 42.4 per cent of the active population. Nevertheless, women's entry into paid labour did not result in more work performed beyond the standard working hours; rather, for women and men the status quo regarding the share of non-standard times between 1966 and 1999 was maintained. Yet, the share of time worked during non-standard hours was larger for men than for women (8.2 vs. 5.9%, respectively). As such, the average share of work performed during non-standard times declined, due to women's large-scale entry into the labour market and their small share of work performed during non-standard working hours. Men were more likely than women to have work schedules with a relatively large number of non-standard hours, that is, long work days, fragmented work days, and shift work in the morning or at night. In fact, in 1966, night shifts, which accounted for the largest share of work during non-standard times, were an exclusively male affair, since a law dating from 1889 completely prohibited night work for women. Only in 1968, by means of a Royal Decree, was night work for women permitted, albeit under very restricted conditions. Since 1997, the same restrictions on night work have held for men and women.

Women were more likely than men to work a standard 9-to-5 schedule, and thus a very low share of their work occurred during non-standard times. Women were also over-represented regarding part-time work, which is often considered as non-standard work compared to the standard 38-hour work week. However, as shown in Table 2, part-time work is not necessarily characterized by a large amount of work performed beyond standard times. The time-use data revealed that in Belgium the share of work beyond standard times increased for those working part-time in the afternoon. This was particularly the case for women working part time in the afternoon, for whom the share of work performed at non-standard times during weekdays increased significantly, from 5 to 16 per cent between 1966 and 1999; however, only 9.2 per cent of women worked under this arrangement in 1999. It may thus be concluded that the rise in the number of women participating in the labour market did not lead to a massive increase of work performed beyond standard times.

The increase in the flexibilization of work times has been attributed to the massive expansion of the service sector. In the early 1960s, the secondary and tertiary sector employed equal parts of the Belgian population, each about 46 per cent. The decrease in the secondary sector accelerated in the 1970s due to the economic crisis. By 2003, industrial employment had fallen to less than a quarter of total employment in Belgium. As industrial employment decreased, the service industries and the government sector grew. Between 1970 and 2004, the percentage of the active Belgian population employed in the service sector increased from 52.9 to 73.1 per cent [START_REF] De Grauwe | De toekomst van de industrie in België' (The future of industry in Belgium)[END_REF]. The time-use data confirmed this massive expansion. According to our definitions, the percentage of the active population engaged in the service sector increased from 57.8 to 73.8 per cent between 1966 and 1999, while the percentage engaged in the production sector has decreased from 39.5 to 25.1 per cent. All types of services underwent an expansion, except for retail and distribution. In 1966, 22 per cent of the active population worked in the retail and distribution sector. In 1999, this sector accounted for 14.5 per cent of the active population. Those who worked in retail and distribution in 1966 were mainly small-business traders, whereas in 1999 four-fifths of those working in this sector were wage earners employed in large distribution chains.

Other than expected, the amount of work in the Belgian service sector during non-standard times did not increase, at least not on weekdays. In 1966, 8.1 per cent of service-sector work was done outside regular working hours. In 1999, there was a non-significant decrease to 7.1 per cent. In 1999, 62 per cent of those who were active in the service sector worked according to a standard schedule, with 34 per cent working a 9-to-5 schedule. Another 10 per cent worked part time in the mornings including a small share of work beyond standard times. Work in the service sector performed outside the standard time was more likely for those who worked part time in the afternoon. In 1966, service workers with this type of schedule performed only 3.4 per cent of their work time beyond the standard time, but this increased to 15.8 per cent in 1999. This finding confirms that the increase in the size of the service economy was manifested by an increase in part-time employment, extending especially into the evening to meet the increased demand for services at that time. Léonard considered the extended shifts of part-time workers in the hospital and retail sectors in Belgium as evidence of the compressed schedules that have become characteristic of part-time work [START_REF] Léonard | Compressed Working Time[END_REF][START_REF] Masson | Temps de travail flexible et contrainte de disponibilité. Le cas des vendeuses en grands magasins dans la région Suisse Romande' (Flexible working times and and obligation to be available. The case of saleswomen in large stores in the region of Roman Switzerland[END_REF].

Although between 1966 and 1999 there seemed to be no change in the percentage of non-standard work time in the service sector, this general trend may have masked a number of contradictory trends regarding the timing of work in the different sub-sectors of the service industry. The largest share (10%) of weekday work beyond standard times occurred among those employed in technical services, such as water, electricity, health, social services, transporta-tion, and communication. Although this share remained essentially the same during the study period, the sector itself experienced a significant growth between 1966 and 1999, such that by 1999 it employed one-fifth of the active Belgian population (15.4% in 1966). In the sub-sectors of culture, education, science, and socio-cultural and personal services, a considerable share (9%) of work during non-standard times was registered in the two study years. The significant expansion of this sub-sector (from 6.0% in 1966 to 13.1% in 1999) also explains the relatively high level (7.1%) of work beyond standard times in the service sector in general. The only service sub-sectors that registered a significant change in the share of work time performed beyond the standard work hours was public administration, the police, and the army, increasing from 1.5 per cent in 1966 to 6.2 per cent in 1999. Nonetheless, this is still a very modest level of work beyond standard times.

However, the expansion of those sub-sectors (technical services and culture and education) with a relatively large share of work during non-standard times was counteracted by the decreasing importance of another sub-sector. In the retail and distribution sector, there was a significant decrease in the share of non-standard work times. In 1966, 9.6 per cent of the work occurred during nonstandard times, with long work days (sometimes with an evening extension) being very prevalent among small-business traders. By 1999, only 6 per cent of the working hours took place during non-standard times as long work days increasingly gave way to the standard schedules of workers employed by the distribution chains. All this clearly reveals that the retail and distribution sector, which is often named as the typical example of work on non-standard times, was the main reason for work on non-standard times within the service sector in the 1960s, while nowadays it only accounts for a very small share of work on non-standard times in the service sector, at least on weekdays.

The increase in the service sector was strongly connected to the increase in the educational level of the Belgian population. The percentage of the active population with a higher education degree increased from 7.8 to 34.9 per cent between 1966 and 1999, while the percentage of those employed in the service sector with a higher education degree increased from 10.4 to 40 per cent. Individuals with a higher education degree still performed a smaller share of work during non-standard working hours than those without, although this difference was not statistically significant in either study year. In both years, standard work schedules of 9 to 6 and 9 to 5 were more prevalent among the higher educated, while the early version of the standard work schedule (8 to 4) prevailed among the less well educated. The percentage of work during nonstandard times did not increase significantly between 1966 and 1999 among the highly educated, but the time-use data did not reveal any significant evolution among the middle and lower educated either. However, maintenance of the status quo regarding the share of work performed outside standard times by people of various educational levels and the small, non-significant difference between those levels may be indicative of a number of contradictory trends within the various educational levels themselves. In this context, the relationship between the type of job and the nature of the work schedule provided several interesting insights. For example, there was a significant increase in the amount of work performed outside standard times by semi-skilled and skilled manual workers. In 1999, these workers spent almost 16 per cent of their work time during non-standard hours, compared to only 8.7 per cent in 1966. Clerical workers also registered a significant increase in work beyond standard times, from 2.9 to 5.7 per cent, which, broadly speaking, still represented a relatively low level of flexibilization. The self-employed, by contrast, registered a significant decrease in working hours at non-standard times. In 1966, almost threequarters of the self-employed worked in the retail and distribution sector, and their small shop or other independent activity often demanded long working hours. By 1999, however, the self-employed were much less likely to be engaged in commerce and distribution, which explains the lower likelihood of the self-employed to work long hours beyond standard work times. Instead, in 1999, long days were predominantly worked by managers and professionals (62%), whereas in 1966 this was more prevalent among craftsmen. The latter accounted for 39 per cent of all long working days with an evening extension in 1966 but only 25 per cent in 1999. Still, in both research years, craftsmen were over-represented in this type of work schedule compared to their proportion in the active population.

The time-use data did not reveal a relationship between workers' ages and their likeliness to work non-standard schedules. Household situation did not affect the work schedule either. Unfortunately, the available data did not allow in-depth explanations of the timing of work. The sample of workers was too small to assess the evolution of work times within particular subgroups of the active population, for example women in the retail and distribution sector. Other background variables that might have affected paid work hours were not included in the questionnaire. It may very well be that the urbanization level of a worker's place of residence, the level of time sovereignty, and the predictability of the end of the working day are important in understanding the prevalence of non-standard work schedules. Such information was lacking from the available dataset.

The 24-hour Society Reconsidered in Belgium

Contrary to expectations, the decline in the number of weekly working hours in Belgium was not offset by an increased share of work occurring beyond standard times. As was the case for total work time in general, the number of non-standard hours decreased mainly due to a decline in work on Saturday. Of course, in 1966, Saturday morning was not considered as a non-standard work time, since 65.5 per cent of the active population worked at that time. Evening work, night work and Sunday work were exceptional in 1999 as was true in 1966.

Sequence analysis allowed us to create a typology of work schedules on weekdays that was derived inductively from the data rather than coded for ex ante. The results revealed an increase in the proportion of standard work schedules (9 to 5 and 8 to 4) such that in 1999 they accounted for the work pattern of almost half of the active population compared to only one-third in 1966. Work schedules characterized by a considerable share of work performed during non-standard times, such as long work days and fragmented work patterns, became less prevalent during the study period.

Belgium witnessed more or less the same macro-level changes during the second half of the 20th century as occurred in the USA. During that time, the participation of women in the labour market doubled, which contributed to making the service economy by far the largest economic sector. Nonetheless, these changes did not result in a larger share of work taking place at nonstandard times; rather, almost two-thirds of the population working in service jobs had standard schedules, including one-third with 9-to-5 jobs. Most of this group was made up of women, who were more likely than men to work standard hours. The expansion of the service economy and the massive entrance of women into the labour market were accompanied by the growth of part-time work, mainly performed during standard times. Developments in the various industries and the evolution of working times within them did not result in a general increase of non-standard work hours, at least not on weekdays. It is, however, possible that some sub-sectors of the service industry witnessed an increase in work performed on Saturdays and Sundays. Unfortunately, we were unable to test this hypothesis due to the small samples.

The Belgian findings stand in stark contrast to what is found in the USA, where an increase in work at non-standard times occurred during the last decades of the 20th century [START_REF] Presser | Job, Family and Gender: Determinants of Non-standard Work Schedules among Employed Americans in 1991[END_REF][START_REF] Hamermesh | The Timing of Work over Time[END_REF][START_REF] Beers | Flexible Schedules and Shift Work: Replacing the "9-to-5" Workday?[END_REF]. However, the findings from the USA are often misunderstood. [START_REF] Hamermesh | The Timing of Work over Time[END_REF], for instance, pointed to the fact that the incidence of evening and night work declined sharply in the USA between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, while the fraction of work performed at the fringes of the traditional working day grew. The increase in work performed at non-standard times was not due to more workers employed in evening, night, or weekend work but rather to an increased propensity for the work day to start at around 6 or 7 am and/or end around 5 or 6 pm. Consequently, the increase in non-standard work schedules in the USA was the outcome of a broader dispersion of what might be viewed as standard working hours, and not a vast increase in the incidence of work at uncommon times (nights and Sundays). The Belgian data revealed neither an increase in night, evening, or weekend work nor an augmentation of work at the fringes of the regular working day. This may have reflected the general decrease in the amount of work time in Belgium, and the increase in the proportion of part-time work. In the USA, a decrease in the time spent working was not as clear as in most European countries. Also, the varying institutional contexts, together with differences in the strength and presence of labour unions, certainly explain part of the difference in the duration and timing of the work schedules of many European countries and the USA.

All studies cited in this article claiming an increase in work performed at nonstandard times were based on surveys in which the respondents reported on the prevalence of their working times. In time-budget studies, respondents registered their activities on the day(s) selected by the researchers. Most workers at least occasionally work during non-standard times and this can be reported in a questionnaire. However, since work is usually performed during standard work hours, it is that information which is reported for most of the randomly assigned days in time-budget studies. Thus, time-budget studies might be more conservative but also more realistic in registering non-standard work times. Our findings are supported by the conclusions reached by the authors of a detailed study of work times in The Netherlands, based on time-use data collected in five-year intervals since 1975: the amount of work done at atypical work times decreased rather than increased in the last decades of the previous century [START_REF] Breedveld | Regelmatig Onregelmatig[END_REF].

Notes

The authors thank Laurent Lesnard (Observatoire Sociologique du Changement, CNRS) for providing the necessary analysis programme and for his help with the implementation of the analysis.

1. These data were collected by Philip J. Stone and are available through the archive of the Henry A. Murray Research Center of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. This data set was made accessible in 1983. 2. To bring the 1966 sample in line with the national population, we calculated new weighting coefficients based on the respondents' sex, age, and educational class. The census data from 1961 were used as a base for constructing the weighting coefficients. These ranged from 0.27 for men aged 40-65 with a higher education degree, to 2.33 for men age 19-39 with a lower level degree. To bring the 1999 sample in line with the national population, the data were weighted on an individual level, taking into account region, sex, age, educational level, season, and day of the week. Weighting coefficients ranged from 0.08 (women from the Brussels region aged 70-74 years with a higher education (non-university) degree who registered their time use in December) to 7.38 (women from the Flemish region older than 75 years with a lowerlevel degree who registered their time use in July). 3. To gauge the evolution of the importance of work done at non-standard working times, we calculated the proportion of work performed at standard and non-standard working times for both research years on an aggregate level. To do so, the amount of time spent working at the different time periods (day, evening, or night) for every day of the week were determined separately for the active population in each research year. These durations were then weighted using the individual weighting coefficients and summed up for each time period of a given day separately. Subsequently, these aggregate durations were weighted for every weekday in order to be equally represented. These weighted aggregate durations represent the number of hours of work performed during a particular time period on a particular day of the week. By means of these aggregate durations, the share of working hours performed on typical and non-standard times was calculated. 4. It was not necessary to include active respondents who did not work on that particular day in an analysis that tries to identify work schedules. Each of the respondents in the sequence database had a sequence of 144 10-minute intervals, representing the 24 hours in a day (1440 minutes). Each interval was assigned code 1, when the respondent was working at that time, or code 2 otherwise. 5. The dynamic Hamming distance was implemented by means of a macro in the SAS programme that also calculated the dynamic substitution cost. Accordingly, datasets from the two study years were taken into account to the same extent and within each year each respondent was taken into account according to individual weight (as discussed in Note 2). Theoretically, substitution costs vary between 0 and 4. Four is the base from which all four possible probabilities (ranging between 0 and 1) of transition at moment T are deducted. As such, very high transition probabilities from a and b, or in the reverse order, between T-1 and T and between T and T+1, result in a very low substitution cost. Very low transition probabilities between states a and b at moment T imply that the substitution cost will be close to four and thus relatively high (see also [START_REF] Lesnard | Optimal Matching and Social Sciences[END_REF]. 6. A hierarchical clustering procedure was used, since the exact number of clusters to be created was not known. The Beta-flexible clustering algorithm was implemented with beta set at -0.25, as this clustering procedure has performed well in different circumstances. Other social researchers analysing time-budget data with sequence analysis applied the same algorithm with satisfying results. Clustering is a heuristic procedure and there are no real statistics supporting the method. It is impossible to decide on a statistical basis how many clusters should be maintained to give the best representation of the sub-rhythms, that is, the work schedules, present in the data. 7. Source for 1961: Census on 31 December 1961 (excluding 14-year-olds and retired persons). Source for 1999: Labour Force Survey 1999 FOD Economie-Afdeling Statistiek.

FIGURE 1

 1 FIGURE 1 Tempogram for paid work performed by the active population on a weekday in 1966 and in 1999

FIGURE 2

 2 FIGURE 2 Tempograms and mean sequences for paid work carried out on weekdays for 1966 and 1999 for all 12 types of work schedules

TABLE 1 Percentage of work performed during standard and non-standard times with respect to the active Belgian population, aged 19 to 65, in 1966 and 1999 (calculations on aggregate level)

 1

				TUS 1966	TUS 1999
		Number of	Share of	Share of time Share of time
	Time period	hours in	time period period in total period in total
		time period in full week working time working time
	Evening work	21	12.5%	5.4%	3.9%
	Night work	56	33.3%	3.2%	2.7%
	Weekend work	26	15.5%	11.0%	7.2%
	of which on Saturday	13	7.75%	9.2%	4.3%
	of which on Sunday	13	7.75%	1.8%	2.9%
	Non-standard working times	103	61.3%	19.6%	13.8%
	Standard working times	65	38.7%	80.4%	86.2%
	Total week	168	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%

TABLE 2 Twelve types of work schedules on working days and their share in 1966 and 1999, including timing, average work duration, and percentage of work at non-standard times

 2

	Percentage of

2% ns 1.0% 8h06 ns 8h02 70.6% ns 71.5% ns statistically non-significant (p > = 0.05); * statistically significant at p < 0.05; ** statistically significant at p < 0.01; *** statistically significant at p < 0.001.

  work schedule, in which work is performed exclusively during office hours, increased from 1966 to 1999 and the standard work day became shorter.

	100%			100%
	80%			80%
	60%			60%
	40%			40%
	20%			20%
	0%			0%
	0:00	4.00	8:00 12:00 16:00 20:00	0:00	4.00	8:00 12:00 16:00 20:00
	100%			100%
	80%			80%
	60%			60%
	40%			40%
	20%			20%
	0%			0%
	0:00	4.00	8:00 12:00 16:00 20:00	0:00	4.00	8:00 12:00 16:00 20:00
	100%			100%
	80%			80%
	60%			60%
	40%			40%
	20%			20%
	0%			0%
	0:00	4.00	8:00 12:00 16:00 20:00	0:00	4.00	8:00 12:00 16:00 20:00
	100%			100%
	80%			80%
	60%			60%
	40%			40%
	20%			20%
	0%			0%
	0:00	4.00	8:00 12:00 16:00 20:00	0:00	4.00	8:00 12:00 16:00 20:00
	100%			100%
	80%			80%
	60%			60%
	40%			40%
	20%			20%
	0%			0%
	0:00	4.00	8:00 12:00 16:00 20:00	0:00	4.00	8:00 12:00 16:00 20:00
	100%			100%
	80%			80%
	60%			60%
	40%			40%
	20%			20%
	0%			0%
	0:00	4.00	8:00 12:00 16:00 20:00	0:00	4.00	8:00 12:00 16:00 20:00

standard

Time & Society copyright © 2008 SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) VOL. 17 No. 1 (2008), pp. 63-83 0961-463X DOI: 10.1177/0961463X07086310 www.sagepublications.com

TIME & SOCIETY 17(1)


Aileen O'carroll

Fuzzy Holes and Intangible Time Time in a knowledge industry

Keywords: information technology, knowledge, working time

HAL is

Introduction

This article looks at the types of time that accompany work in the knowledge economy. 1 [START_REF] Hassan | Network Time and the New Knowledge Epoch[END_REF] documents the links between knowledge production, temporality and the technologies upon which societies are based. It details the tensions that arise when the creative process of knowledge production comes into conflict with the temporal frameworks of the knowledge economy.

'When time is money, speed becomes an absolute and unassailable imperative for business' (Adam, 2003: 101). Adam locates the origins of current organizational rationality in the concept of 'time economy', which implies that the shorter the period of time between an investment and its return, the greater the profit. Competition adds another layer of time compression. The faster a product is produced, the cheaper it can be, so the competition can be undercut. Furthermore, if there is more time left to produce another product, all the better to compete with one's rivals in industry. In opposition to this speeded-up time, is time in creative or caring industries, where work is not 'amenable to translation into the clock-time units on one hand and time compression on the other' (Adam, 2003: 102).

This article examines the production of knowledge in workplaces located in the software sector. The sector was chosen as it lies at the very heart of the knowledge economy. It is from this sector that the metaphors of speed, instancy and rationality spread like wildfire [START_REF] Sennett | The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism[END_REF]. 2 [START_REF] Lundvall | The Globalising Learning Economy: Implications for Innovation Policy[END_REF] describe the information technology (IT) industry as 'a fast growing industry in itself, characterized by shorter product life cycles and faster technological development ' (p. 28). However, at the same time, as will be shown, the industry rests on a process with quite a different temporal reality -a process that takes time, that cannot be hurried beyond a certain point. Time spent thinking or waiting for thought is an indispensable part of the working day and cannot be willed or wished away. Knowledge is tacit and embodied, such that learning is social [START_REF] Lundvall | The Globalising Learning Economy: Implications for Innovation Policy[END_REF]. Yet this second 'lived' time of knowledge work is often hidden, even from those living it. Here then is a paradox. 3 The limits of the IT workplace are the limits to how fast, how often, how continuous the creative effort is, yet the creative effort is a process that resists compression.

This article draws upon a research study that examined the working time of individuals employed in Irish software development companies, and material from interviews undertaken for that study illustrates the points made in this argument. For reasons of space, the interviews are reproduced here in part only. Twenty-one high-end IT workers participated. The software workers were asked, over the course of a year (October 1999 to September 2000), to fill in weekly time diaries which noted their starting and finishing times. They were also interviewed five times throughout the year. 4 Within software companies, I interviewed programmers whose job is centred on creating language and symbols, and marketing executives who create symbols of a different kind. This range of occupations was chosen to illustrate the breadth of work that can be considered 'knowledge work'. Any sector that has a similar type of work will have similar types of time associated with it. If the work process occurs in similar industrial time-frames, the same tensions as described in this article will arise. 5 By understanding these times we can best create working environments that facilitate and encourage creativity.

Thompson linked a particular type of work -factory work in industrial capitalism -with a particular understanding of time: clock time [START_REF] Thompson | Time and Work Discipline[END_REF]. My argument in this article is that the particular nature of knowledge work, as illustrated by the work process of the IT workers interviewed, has led to a new experience of working time, yet this experience often remains in the shadow of the clock. My intention in doing this research was to examine the work process of knowledge workers and, by so doing, uncover the nature of working time as it exists on an experiential level: the lived time of work, the qualitative and socially constructed aspect of working time [START_REF] Durkheim | The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology[END_REF](Durkheim, /1976;;[START_REF] Sorokin | Social Time: A Methodological and Functional Analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Hill | Time at Work: An Economic Analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Adam | Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time[END_REF].

The article is divided into three parts followed by a conclusion: in the first part, I describe the type of the research that has been done on working time and locate this article within a particular research framework. The second part examines the relationship between the specific work process of the knowledge workplace and the nature of working time. In particular, I outline the way in which knowledge work alters both the shape of the working day and the way in which time is experienced. Two metaphors are developed: the first illustrates the changing nature of work breaks ('fuzzy holes'), while the second highlights a particular aspect of the time associated with work that is creative or generates knowledge ('intangible time'). In the third part of this article I examine how these workers, given the tension between the lived time of their work and the rationalist time of organizational discourse, manage their time within the workplace. It is here that the dual temporal existence in these organizations becomes visible. On the one hand, time is quantified, decontextualized, rationalized and commodified [START_REF] Hassard | Introduction to the Sociology of Time[END_REF]; on the other hand, for individuals it is lived, created and generated [START_REF] Adam | When Time is Money[END_REF].

Research on Working Time

Industrial working time 'continues to be the central organizational point of reference for whole societies in countries now called "post-industrial"' (Basso, 1998: 23. For an opposing viewpoint see [START_REF] Hardt | Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire[END_REF]. The Industrial Revolution brought with it assembly-line technology, the factory system and an increased urbanization of society. All these processes made it increasingly necessary to co-ordinate time across society in ever more precise and standardized ways. The time work began was measured by the minute, not by the rising of the sun or the call of a farmyard animal. As social organization became more complex, time measured by the clock became the most important time in society (in contrast, other times, times of experience, were devalued). Theorists are now examining how the shift from an industrial to a globalized society is affecting the temporal structure within which society operates. Information communication technology (ICT) allows far distant places to be connected. Much production is now intellectual rather than material -knowledge is produced as well as objects. Turnover time contracts as the market for these products rapidly changes. The stand-alone factory has been replaced by global supply chains, which incorporate both local clusters and global networks.

Research on contemporary industrial working time broadly fits into three research frameworks: one that looks at the length of working hours, one that examines whether work is experienced more or less intensely, and one that looks at the conflicts which arise between different temporal rationalities. [START_REF] Perrons | Work, Life and Time in the New Economy: An Introduction[END_REF] suggest that 'the potential of the technological and associated changes bound up with the emergence of the "new economy" seem to be developed to raise the intensity, duration and participation in paid work ' (p. 54). The software sector in particular has a reputation for long hours. [START_REF] Gershuny | Changing Times. Work and Leisure in Post-Industrial Society[END_REF] argues that those in higher skill jobs are 'time poor', working longer hours than those in lower skilled occupations; yet this reputation is not necessarily justified. Studies of working hours in the software sector in Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom found that while a small proportion of employees work long hours, more do not [START_REF] Plantenga | New Forms of Employment and Working Time in the Service Economy (NESY): Country Case Studies Conducted in Five Service Sectors[END_REF][START_REF] O'carroll | The Long and the Short of It: Working Time in the Irish IT Sector[END_REF].

Other research frameworks do not focus on changes in the absolute number of hours of work, but on the nature of work within that time. The issue is not necessarily long hours but the intensification of working time [START_REF] Brannen | The Polarization and Intensification of Parental Employment in Britain: Consequences for Children, Families and the Community[END_REF]. Nowotny argues that time now is experienced as speeded up [START_REF] Nowotny | Time: The Modern and The Postmodern Experience[END_REF].

A different approach to the issue focuses on the intersection of different timeframes. [START_REF] Adam | Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time[END_REF] distinguishes between rationalized time versus qualitative time. [START_REF] Hochschild | The Time Bind. When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work[END_REF] argues that time is increasingly seen via the Taylorist lens of efficiency and rationality and [START_REF] Southerton | Squeezing Time: Allocating Practices, Coordinating Networks and Scheduling Society[END_REF] shows that the internalization of a rationalist approach to time management can result in the creation of 'hot' and 'cold' temporal spots, times of harriedness and unhurried times, which in themselves increase the sense of time pressure. In academic life, [START_REF] Ylijoki | Conflicting Time Perspectives in Academic Work[END_REF] describe the tension between the 'scheduled' time of project deadlines, lecturing hours and administrative meetings, and the 'timeless time' of academic research. These theorists all address both the experiential aspects of time and the existence of conflicting time-frames.

This article is located in the third research framework. It documents the timeframes of knowledge work and examines how they are linked to particular types of work processes. Therefore, in the next section of this article, I will examine the work process itself, and describe how it is bound up with a particular sense of time: a time that is not linear, homogeneous, quantifiable nor indeed particularly visible.

Fuzzy Holes and Intangible Time

In the high-tech workplace, work time and non-work time intertwine each other. Irish legislation on working time defines work as when one is both at one's place of work and doing work. 6 It has never been the case, however, that all the time spent at work is time spent working [START_REF] Thompson | Time and Work Discipline[END_REF][START_REF] May | From Banana Time to Just-In-Time: Power and Resistance at Work[END_REF]. The working day has always been peppered with holes, some officially sanctioned and protected by law (such as lunch time), some taken when desired (such as cigarette breaks) [START_REF] Madden | The Cost of Employee Smoking in Ireland[END_REF]. The nature of these holes, however, has changed. In the Fordist factory, the time of work is clearly demarcated from the time of non-work. The working day begins and ends at mutually agreed timesand indeed, as [START_REF] Thompson | Time and Work Discipline[END_REF] noted, many of the struggles of industrial society came to be centred on these times of starting and finishing. [START_REF] Marx | Capital[END_REF] identified the presence of holes in the working day and [START_REF] Roy | Banana Time: Job Satisfaction and Informal Interaction[END_REF] described their content in an industrial context. Faced with a work that was routine, repetitive and dull, he found his co-workers peppered the time with spaces of variety and interest such that:

The twelve hours of 'click, move die, -click, move dies' became as easy to endure as eight hours of varied activity in the oil fields or eight hours of playing the piecework game in a machine shop. The 'beast of boredom' was gentled to the harmlessness of a kitten. (Roy, 1960: 165) The regular monotony of the work process is mirrored by a more sociable and entertaining routine. First comes peach time in which a peach is shared; then comes banana time in which a banana is stolen; then window time in which the window is opened; and so follows pick-up time, fish time and coke time. These holes in work time are invented and maintained by his co-workers. When for a few days these routines are disrupted, the unbearable boredom of the work returns. Within the working day, there is a clear divide between the times of work from the times of non-work. Like an Emmental cheese, work can be imagined as a solid block, a block of work-directed activity, surrounding smaller spaces emptied of work. In contrast, in the knowledge workplace, to continue the food imagery, time at work is more like a dish of spaghetti; it is difficult to discern where one time ends and another begins.

What gives work time this spaghetti-like nature? In this section I look at the time of work and the time of non-work and show that between these two poles is a grey area of time during which one is not working and not quite on a break. There are two aspects of this grey time that I will consider. First, there is the break that is not quite a break; the 'fuzzy holes' that permeate the working day. Second, there is work that is not quite work; the 'intangible time' of work that takes place when one does not recognize that one is working.

Fuzzy holes

As holes open up in the working day, they are also shut down. As the working day is intersected by breaks, it also is intersected by tasks. Two aspects of the work process, which have opposite effects on time in work, result in 'fuzzy holes'. First, the process is both unpredictable and networked [START_REF] Abbott | The Future of Professions: Occupation and Expertise in the Age of Organisation[END_REF]. Second, the work process within these industries encompasses many different tasks and responsibilities.

Aspects of the industry can open up holes in the working day. Each individual component of production is reliant on other elements (other project groups, management decisions on future production, the state of the markets). The software workers, in the following example, need to synchronize their work with others in the production process. They stay late to take conference calls with team members in other countries:

You're looking at your watch and going, 'I'm going to be here till nine o'clock waiting for them to get this finished . . . They are going to run into a snag that you're going to have to be there for. (Dermot 2: 356) [START_REF] Harvey | The Condition of Postmodernity[END_REF] argues that with postmodernity there is an 'incentive to create the world-market, to reduce spatial barriers and to annihilate space through time' (p. 233). It is ironic that along with the compression of space comes the opening up of time -the creation of empty times of waiting.

The chief organizational feature that limits the spread of the empty times of waiting is multitasking. Job definitions have broadened as workers have heightened responsibility for an increased variety of tasks [START_REF] Frenkel | Re-constituting Work: Trends towards Knowledge Work and Info-normative Control[END_REF]. Multitasking means more than having a number of tasks to work on; it also means having to do more things at once. It is a phrase derived from the computer technology that frames the working day, the desktop computer that allows one to switch between programs in an instant and work on many different applications simultaneously. Short tasks are useful, in that they plug the holes left between larger projects. The variation in time taken for each task allows new tasks to be slotted in to the time spent waiting for another. Such multitasking closes holes down. The phrase 'taking a break' can have two meanings: it can mean a break from a task (in order to switch to another task) or it can mean a break from work (in order to switch to non-work activity or space). Multitasking facilitates the former but not the latter and thus breaks become 'fuzzy'.

Email is the ultimate micro-task; for the interviewees it operated in a grey area between work and non-work. For most of them, email constantly filtered in throughout the day. Very rarely was reading email included as a break in the diaries. Reading a personal email took only seconds, a quick flick between thoughts as one perused the task at hand. Email is the ultimate example of a work time that is short and immediate and it is both a work and a non-work activity. All the software workers were required to be on work-based email lists and spent parts of their day reading and writing emails. For many, email was considered to be an interruption to the working day, yet because of the highly social nature of this work and the importance of communication for organization and learning, dealing with it was a task of some importance. Most were also in correspondence with friends and family. Some were on email mailing lists with friends working in other computer companies, enabling virtual conversations to be pursued with a wide group of people. [START_REF] Brannen | Time and the Negotiation of Work-Family Boundaries[END_REF] argues that email transgresses the boundary between work and home; within the workplace, email also acts as the boundary between work and non-work. Email is also ambiguous. Each one might take a couple of seconds to read, but dealing with all of them might take a morning or an afternoon. It is short and fragmented, yet also time consuming. It is neither all work, nor all non-work.

Multitasking changes the nature of breaks; multitask breaks are 'fuzzy' because the employee isn't taking a break from working to not working, but taking a break from one task to another. Though the other task may be a personal project (thus perhaps considered 'not work time') it may also at a future point become part of the production process (thus becoming 'work time'). Most discussions on the barrier between work time and non-work time focus on the colonization of non-work time by work (for example, people working from home after formal work hours or being on call; see [START_REF] Hinrichs | Working Time in Transition[END_REF]. Here we see that even within working time the spaces of non-work, which were always part of the working day (see, for example, [START_REF] Roy | Banana Time: Job Satisfaction and Informal Interaction[END_REF], are less clearly delineated. The boundaries between work and non-work within the workplace are blurred.

Intangible time

'Intangible time' results from a work process in which particular parts of the process, such as information gathering and exchange and the processing of ideas and concepts, are intangible. By this I mean that employees are not aware of the time spent at these activities as time spent working. These activities, while being an essential element of the work process, are also seen as peripheral to it. I will now look in detail at how one of the participants, Linda, talks about the various aspects of her work process in order to uncover the tangible and intangible nature of her work.

To the company and the workers, the aspects of the work process that result in measurable outputs are tangible and unhidden. Time spent working becomes defined as time spent producing these measurable outputs; it is the actual writing that counts and not all the other activities that surround the writing. In this description, Linda describes the various tasks that make up her working day. Linda makes a distinction between 'thinking' and the rest of her tasks. To her, 'thinking' is her central activity.

My whole job is thinking so I'm a proper knowledge worker. So the output of that then is writing documents, having meetings, talking to people, sending emails, all that kind of thing, but the actual meat of it is thinking, so sometimes, I find anyway, I find it very difficult to do that kind of work in the morning, so I do background reading and stuff and that kind of work can happen anywhere, if I'm walking along home sometimes I do it. (Linda 2: 21)

In a later interview she explains that she stays late because she has too much work to do and generally does little work in the morning. Here we can see that by 'work' she means her core activity of thinking, and of writing those thoughts down. Work involves the production of a tangible product; everything else is 'very little'.

Yet she needs the social interaction to keep in touch with what is happening in the company and in the industry. IT is both isolating and unifying. It is isolating in that each person is physically separate from another (sometimes across great physical boundaries) and in that each works alone solving his or her particular part of the puzzle. It is unifying in that knowledge is passed from person to person, expertise is shared and therefore 'IT heightens "connectivity"' (Frenkel et al., 1995: 775). Linda does not describe her work process only in terms of thinking or writing. She wouldn't work away from her desk because she feels that all the communicative aspects of work (the chatting, the meetings, the emails) are also a necessary part of her job. Perlow also described how the working day of the engineers he studied was peppered with interactions 'which are crucial to getting the job done' [START_REF] Perlow | Finding Time: How Corporations, Individuals, and Families can Benefit from New Work Practices[END_REF] 82) yet which were seen as deflecting from the 'real work' of engineering. She identified six types of interactions: helping, checking, integrating, planning, socializing and a miscellaneous category. Fletcher adds a further four 'invisible' interactions to the list. These are preserving the life and the well-being of the project, empowering others to achieve, empowering oneself to achieve, and creating the social entity that is the team [START_REF] Fletcher | Toward a Theory of Relational Practice in Organisations: A Feminist Reconstruction of 'Real' Work[END_REF].

It is not only connectivity that is hidden. From her interviews, we know that time is spent gathering and assimilating knowledge that informs her thought process and enables her to write. This is how Linda describes her writing:

I can only do it when I am in the right frame of mind. It could take me all day but it might only take me two hours to do the writing, to get to the stage of actually writing it. (Linda 3: 563) For her, writing is time-consuming because she's not always in the right frame of mind or because she finds it easier to work in the afternoon. She doesn't account for the time spent leading up to the writing. Looking at the work process itself, we can see that many different types of time combine to produce the finished product. Being organized for writing takes time; time in the morning is spent preparing. Here there is a gap in her sense of her own work time, a hole in the working day; yet it is not a hole spent at leisure on breaks or away from work. As this final quotation illustrates, for Linda it is 'not quite' work: Q. That is funny, you said you are a slow starter but yet you read all that in the morning!

A. I do stuff but I don't produce anything. In the morning I do a lot of reading, and flap around. (Linda 3: 662)

An examination of Linda's work process illustrates the point that connectivity and thought, while being an essential element of the work process, are also seen as peripheral to it.

Time Management

These software workers have internalized a particular business ethic, an approach to work in which only the output, visible and measurable, is counted as 'real'. The process that leads to that output fades from view. Linda sees her difficulties as coming from her own personality rather than as being related to the way the work process is organized. [START_REF] Kunda | Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation[END_REF] described the effects of cultural management in high-tech companies: 'Members have internalized the "problem of control" that lies at the heart of organization and the private selves of members have become part of the "contested terrain"' (p. 220). The temporal rationality of the organization sees production in terms of homologous units of time, which may be manipulated. As aspects of the work process that take time are hidden, 7 this is the rationality that is internalized. Autonomy and self-regulation of time are features of the knowledge workplace [START_REF] Hinrichs | Working Time in Transition[END_REF][START_REF] Paolucci | The Changing Dynamics of Working Time[END_REF]Francis-Smythe and Roberston, 1999;[START_REF] Symes | Chronicles of Labour: A Discourse Analysis of Diaries[END_REF][START_REF] Brannen | Time and the Negotiation of Work-Family Boundaries[END_REF]. The following comments are typical: 'The amount of work I can't decide on, how I decide to organize myself is quite flex-ible' (Aoife 1: 17); 'It is very much left up to us what way we do it as long as it gets done by that date' (Catherine 2: 31).

As companies become increasingly involved in networks of relationships, company-wide time management is increasingly important [START_REF] Symes | Chronicles of Labour: A Discourse Analysis of Diaries[END_REF]. At an organizational level, planning rests on the calendar, deadlines being of core importance. The management of time mentioned previously occurred within the constraints of externally imposed deadlines. However, unpredictability, the nonrepetitive nature of the tasks, the dependence on technology or on others can lead to tasks taking much longer (or indeed much less time) to complete than expected, making it difficult to plan according to the clock. In contrast, therefore, at the level of the work process, the task is the unit of importance in planning. In looking at the organization of working time within work we can see a separation, therefore, between corporate time and the time of the individual work process.

The software workers felt that planning according to clock or calendar was not appropriate to the work process for a number of reasons. I have already described the difficulties in predicting how long it would take to complete a task. In addition, the 'bitty' nature of work meant that new tasks kept arriving on the desk. The variables within the plan were constantly changing, both in terms of how many things had to be done and centrally in terms of what had to be done.

For some, it was the people behind the tasks that introduced unpredictability into the work process. For those in customer support, each new task comes with an impatient user attached. For others, the customers for whom they are creating a product are part of the work team. This reflects the transmitting of the management function to the customer relationship [START_REF] Leidner | Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinisation of Every Day Life[END_REF].

Three approaches to the self-organization of work were mentioned by the interviewees, none of which included management according to a timetable. Some tackled tasks in terms of priority. Often this meant tackling the tasks that they were receiving most reminders about from management, from other members in the project group, or from customers, rather than the most urgent tasks. Others operated a 'first come, first served' system. For others, those tasks that were most interesting were seen to first. In all these strategies it is the task and not time that is the basis of organization. Yet these strategies are applied within the shadow of the clock; the time-frame within which these tasks are to be completed is determined by deadlines set by others. Corporate time-frames, which equate speed with efficiency, are very different from the individual time-frames of the work process.

This only becomes problematic when there is time scarcity. Fuzzy holes are vulnerable to compression and hard to defend. They are easily squeezed under pressure. Intangible time (intangible only in terms of perception, finite in nature) is added on to the day, increasing its length. In the first sections of this article, the software workers saw the organization of their working time as problematic in many ways, and felt it could and should be organized more rationally. In this section, we can see there is a divergence between this rationalist understanding of time and the actions they actually undertake. Their work process reflects a qualitative understanding of time, while their rhetoric describes time in a more quantitative manner.

Conclusion

This article has examined the work processes found in workplaces typical of the knowledge economy and found that it gives rise to a particular type of working time; time which can be fuzzy and intangible. I have described both the experiential aspects of time and the existence of conflicting time-frames. I argue that there is a dual temporal existence; and while the participants often adopt the rationalist discourse of industrial working time, their work practice remains located in another, less visible time. [START_REF] Adam | When Time is Money[END_REF] highlighted the fact that particular work processes, especially those that stand outside the business world (creative or caring occupations), produce a non-linear, non-uniform, nonquantifiable type of time. This article argues that we do not need to go to the periphery to find similar temporal experiences because they are to be found at the very core of the knowledge economy.

Time in these IT companies is characterized by the interplay between flexibility (wanted by the market, the company and the individuals) and high levels of employee temporal autonomy. A corporate rationality of time pictures time as manageable, quantitative, organized and arranged, such that production occurs at maximum speed. Behind this, however, there is another temporal reality. For the individual work process, the time of production encompasses times of thought, imagination and sociability.

Time in work is often described as nothing more than an abstract homologous unit of exchange and measurement. Here I have outlined the other time that exists; time as a qualitative, lived variable. By looking at the work process itself we see that the nature of the work undertaken, and the networks within which it is undertaken, operate according to a different temporal logic than a rationality which decontextualizes working time from the times of the work process. Speeding up is not always possible and, as [START_REF] Southerton | Squeezing Time: Allocating Practices, Coordinating Networks and Scheduling Society[END_REF] has highlighted, senses of 'harriedness' are 'generated by a need to allocate and schedule practices within designated time frames' (p. 5). Consequently, there is a need to fit one type of practice into another type of time-frame. Within these workplaces, perhaps the important distinction to be made is not between time of work and time of non-work but between a corporate rationality that compresses time and a reality that allows time. In other words, the distinction lies between a rationality that embraces the time it takes to be creative (which includes time to be sociable) and a rationality that views time as problematic. This article is therefore in accord with analyses which argue that senses of time-squeeze do not necessarily emanate from longer hours. Rather, they result from the conflict between different temporal frames [START_REF] Adam | When Time is Money[END_REF][START_REF] Southerton | Squeezing Time: Allocating Practices, Coordinating Networks and Scheduling Society[END_REF].

As in earlier eras, there is a struggle over time in the workplace. In order to be able to use time in our own interests, we need to be able to understand the particular natures of the multiple temporalities within which we operate. The regular, bounded time of the Industrial Revolution and the Fordist factory has been replaced by a time that is less clearly demarcated. It is this spaghetti time, with its intangible nature and fuzzy holes, which leads to a sense of working time intensification. [START_REF] Hassan | Network Time and the New Knowledge Epoch[END_REF] argues that 'to break the nexus between neo-liberal globalization and the ICT revolution would be to begin to control the spread and the comprehensiveness of network time in people's lives' (p. 239). If we develop an awareness and understanding of the multiple times involved in knowledge production, then the possibility emerges of producing knowledge in a way that resists the rationalist logic of the capitalist workplace. It is impossible to say if the knowledge produced will be better, but there are strong reasons to suggest that it would be. A production process built on an understanding of the rhythms and the collaborative nature of knowledge production would be one that is more capable of mobilizing the creativity and inventiveness of the human mind. Notes 1. By 'knowledge economy' I am following the definition provided by [START_REF] Powell | The Knowledge Economy[END_REF]; that is, 'production and services based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technical and scientific advance as well as rapid obsolescence. The key component of a knowledge economy is a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or natural resources' (p. 199). 2. Metaphors like 'nanosecond culture' [START_REF] Rifkin | Time Wars[END_REF], 'Internet time' [START_REF] Cusumano | Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and its Battle with Microsoft[END_REF] and 'timeless time' [START_REF] Castells | The Rise of the Network Society[END_REF]. 3. [START_REF] Adam | When Time is Money[END_REF] provides a similar paradox referring to just-in-time production; on the one hand the system is centred on the elimination of waste time and high levels of flexibility. On the other hand it is an extremely complicated system that requires high levels of synchronization. It cannot be maintained without a highly co-operative workforce, and 'such a workforce is not achievable if the just-in-time logic is extended to the worker' (p. 108). The logic of just-in-time is reversed on the individual level and workers are offered long-term contacts and security to secure their commitment. 4. For a description of changes to work organization that occurred during the 'Celtic Tiger' economic boom in Ireland, see [START_REF] Collins | The New World of Work: Labour Markets in Contemporary Ireland[END_REF]. 5. There are many similarities, for example, between the work of the software workers and the research work of academics. The chief difference is that academic work orga-nization is not as tightly bound to the time-frames of the market. However, changes in the structure of academic work and in the allocation of resources that attempt to mimic the market mean that the tensions discussed previously are increasingly part of the academic work life. 6. Organization of Working Time Act 1997; see http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/ ZZA20Y1997.html 7. Another participant experienced a variation on this theme. Recently promoted to a more managerial position, she found that the administrative tasks that accompanied her new role caused her to occasionally stay late. The technical job she continued to do was conducted within normal working hours, almost as if the administrative tasks were not seen as part of her real job but as an 'add on'. Intangible work results in intangible time.

I

  stay till 7 . . . I get more done in the afternoon. I get very little work done in the morning. Especially if I am writing something . . .(Linda 3: 21)

  Do you think you will ever change your [pattern of] working hours? . . . A. I don't know, because you miss a lot, if you are not there. Especially at the moment. If you are not there so many things are changing. Ideas are changing the whole time. So if you are not in the office you might miss out. (Linda 3: 21)

Q.

TIME & SOCIETY 17(2/3)

O'CARROLL: FUZZY HOLES AND INTANGIBLE TIME