'Long Hours' work culture; Empty labour
Laurie Taylor explores how and why some employees spend large percentages of their day engaged in private pursuits. Also, the professionals caught up in a 'long hours' work culture.
Empty labour - international statistics suggest that the average time an employee spends engaged in private activities is 1 and a half to 2 hours a day. Laurie Taylor talks to Roland Paulsen, a Swedish sociologist, who interviewed 43 workers who spent around half their working hours on 'empty labour'. Are such employees merely 'slacking' or are such little' subversions' acts of resistance to the way work appropriates so much of our time? They're joined by the writer, Michael Bywater. By contrast, Jane Sturges, discusses her research into professionals caught up, both reluctantly as well as willingly, in a 'long hours' work culture.
Producer: Jayne Egerton.
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Roland Paulsen
Sociologist, Department of Sociology at Uppsala University
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Dissertation:
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Empty Labor: Idleness and Workplace Resistance
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN-10: 1107066417
ISBN-13: 978-1107066410
Michael Bywater
Writer and broadcasterÌý
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Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost and Where Did it Go?
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN-10: 1862077983
ISBN-13: 978-1862077980
Jane Sturges
Reader in Organisational Behaviour, King’s College London
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Abstract:
Work Employment & Society April 2013 vol. 27 no. 2
pp. 351-367ISSN: 0950-0170
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Broadcasts
- Wed 5 Jun 2013 16:00Â鶹Éç Radio 4 FM
- Mon 10 Jun 2013 00:15Â鶹Éç Radio 4
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