Personnel Review, Volume 32, Number 4, 2003

Personnel Review

ISSN 0048-3486 Volume 32 Number 4 2003

Time and management Guest Editors Luchien Karsten and John Leopold

Access this journal online __________________________ 399 Editorial advisory board ___________________________ 400 Abstracts and keywords ___________________________ 401 Guest editorial: time and management John Leopold and Luchien Karsten _________________________________

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Time and management: the need for hora management Luchien Karsten and John Leopold _________________________________

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Home-based teleworking and the employment relationship: managerial challenges and dilemmas Lynette Harris__________________________________________________

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The times and temporalities of home-based telework Susanne Tietze and Gill Musson ___________________________________

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Family-friendly policies in The Netherlands: the tripartite involvement Chantal Remery, Anneke van Doorne-Huiskes and Joop Schippers ________

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CONTENTS

Guest editorial: time and management John Leopold and Luchien Karsten Keywords Time, Management Introduces the special issue on time and management which draws together analyses of these issues from across the European Union. Time and management: the need for hora management Luchien Karsten and John Leopold Keywords Time management, Work, Regulations, European Union, Model Working time patterns are moving away from the traditional pattern of regularity, standardisation and co-ordination to a new triptych of individualism, heterogeneity and irregularity. Seeks to make sense of these changes through the concept of hora management as an approach to manage the interface between temporally asymmetric domains of organisational and domestic space mediated through the space of professional relations. Drawing on the societal approach, defines the three spaces – professional relations, organisational and domestic – and builds a model of their inter-relationship that incorporates the supranational impact of the European Union. Organisational citizenship will require managers to pursue family-friendly policies and recognise that time spent in one domain cannot be equated with time spent in another. Hora management offers a way of managing these tensions and contradictions. Home-based teleworking and the employment relationship: managerial challenges and dilemmas Lynette Harris Keywords Teleworking, Employee relations, Trust, Management, Responsibility, United Kingdom As home-based teleworking grows in the UK, more evidence is needed of how working from home shapes the employment relationship and the implications this may have for those line managers responsible for a home-based workforce. The reported experiences of a sales team and their line managers at one large international drinks manufacturing company

of teleworking during its first year of operation revealed the importance of developing understanding of the complex interface between the domains of work and home life. The findings suggest individual circumstances require close attention before implementing home-based working with line managers recalibrating perceptions of the boundaries between home and work for positive employee relationships to develop within a new paradigm of “home-work” relations.

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The times and temporalities of home-based telework Susanne Tietze and Gill Musson Keywords Homeworking, Teleworking, Time, Time management, Boundaries Drawing on an empirical investigation situated in 25 households of professional managers, who worked regularly at home, this article explores how internalised time discipline is evoked, appropriated and challenged through and in home-based telework. The notion of clock-time is opposed with the notion of task-time and it is shown how both temporalities inform the organisation of paid and unpaid work. It is shown that in some households the simultaneous co-presence of conceptually different temporalities led to an increasing bureaucratisation of time as boundaries between “work” and “the household” had to be maintained and protected. In other households such copresence resulted in the emergence of more task-based approaches to the co-ordination of all activity and more elastic temporal boundaries drawn around them. Family-friendly policies in The Netherlands: the tripartite involvement Chantal Remery, Anneke van Doorne-Huiskes and Joop Schippers Keywords Work, Family-friendly organizations, Policy, Employment, The Netherlands, Service industries The article reports on research among Dutch employers concerning the arrangements they

Personnel Review Vol. 32 No. 4, 2003 Abstracts and keywords q MCB UP Limited 0048-3486

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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Professor Janice R.W. Joplin University of Texas at El Paso, Texas, USA Dr Stephen Bach The Management Centre, King’s College, London, UK

Professor Filip Lievens Department of Personnel Management, Ghent University, Belgium

Professor Greg Bamber Graduate School of Management, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

Dr Hedley Malloch IESEG School of Business and Management, Catholic University of Lille, France

Dr Yehuda Baruch University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

Professor David Megginson Sheffield Business School, Sheffield, UK

Professor Birgit Benkhoff Lehrstu¨hl fu¨r BWL – Personalwirtschaft, Technische Universita¨t, Dresden, Germany

Professor Kathy Monks Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

Professor Shawn Carraher Professor of Management & Global Entrepreneurship, Texas A&M University, USA Professor Cathy Cassell Sheffield University Management School, Sheffield, UK Professor Nancy E. Day Henry W. Bloch School of Business and Public Administration, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City, USA Professor Ken Dovey Rhodes University, East London, South Africa Professor David Farnham Portsmouth Business School, University of Portsmouth, UK

Professor Emmanuel Ogbonna Cardiff Business School, University of Wales, Cardiff Professor Stephen Procter School of Management, University of Newcastle, UK Dr Chris Rowley Department of HRM, The Business School, City University, London, UK Professor Margaret Shaffer Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong Professor Ed Snape Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

Dr Alan Fish Department of HRM, Charles Sturt University, Australia

Dr Stephen Swailes School of Business and Management, Northampton Business School, UK

Dr Stephen Gibb Department of HRM, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland

Professor Shaun Tyson Cranfield University School of Management, Cranfield, UK

Dr Irena Grugulis University of Salford, Salford, UK

Professor Tony Watson Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, UK Professor Adrian Wilkinson Loughborough University Business School, UK Professor Les Worrall University of Wolverhampton Business School, UK

Professor Devi Jankowicz Luton Business School, University of Luton, UK Professor Ulf Johanson Ma¨lardalen University and the IPF Institute at Uppsala University

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Professor Peter Nolan The School of Business & Economic Studies, University of Leeds, UK

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provide for employees to help them with the reconciliation of work and family life. The research not only answers the question of to what extent different employers offer arrangements like childcare facilities, flexible working hours or leave schemes, but it also tries to explain employers’ policies. The explanatory analysis includes organisational characteristics and employers’ opinions with respect to costs and benefits of different arrangements. The empirical analysis is based on a survey among 871 organisations in the profit sector and the non-profit sector. One major conclusion is that family-friendly arrangements have become rather common among organisations; employers are aware of the fact that the reconciliation of work and care has become an issue for an increasing number of workers.

Dealing with part-time work Bastiaan W. Rosendaal Keywords Part-time work, Performance, Job evaluation, Environment This paper examines the relationship between the length of the working week and the performance of employees. It looks at the influence of job features like knowledge intensity, connectivity with other people in the organisation and standardisation; and characteristics of the job environment like stability, flexibility of working schedule and the communication infrastructure. The results indicate a positive effect of shorter working times on task performance. A breaking point of minimum working hours is found between jobs, only directed to task performance and jobs in which the contextual performance and knowledge intensity play a major role.

The management of trust-based working time in Germany Ingo Singe and Richard Croucher Keywords Time management, Trust, Germany, Employees New developments in trust-based working time systems (i.e. systems whereby managers formally devolve their responsibilities for monitoring working time) in Germany are examined. A picture of these systems is presented and the main debates reviewed. It is argued that the successful introduction of such systems is contingent on a number of inter-related factors. These are: company size and management style, external and internal pressures and effective employee representation. It is concluded that such systems are most likely to be successful in larger organisations and that effective employee representation is a key requirement. Current circumstances are not necessarily conducive to the rapid spread of trust-based working time systems. The 35-hour week in France: the French exception? David Alis Keywords France, Work, Time,, Regulations The 1980s and 1990s were periods of farreaching transformations in working hours and flexibility in Europe. Usually those initiatives came from the social partners. Yet France stood out during this period in that it maintained an interventionist state; the climax of public intervention came when the Aubry laws were passed introducing the 35-hour working week. Paradoxically, the Aubry laws resulted not in a weakening of collective bargaining, but in an unprecedented series of negotiations in companies. This article sets out the process leading to the laws, and then analyses the results of the negotiations.

Guest editorial

Guest editorial

Time and management John Leopold Department of HRM, Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK, and

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Luchien Karsten Faculty of Management and Organisation, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands Keywords Time, Management Abstract Introduces the special issue on time and management which draws together analyses of these issues from across the European Union.

Due to the intensification of globalisation our notions of time and space are becoming disembedded. The temporal rhythms of production processes and consumption patterns are changing. The regulatory framework of the employment relationship is under constant review. Companies can no longer rely on standardised approaches to the management of working time and will have to take account of an increasing variety of temporalities when scheduling flexibility. Families stand at the crossroads of several temporalities and this will have an impact on the way people seek to balance work and family life. Concerns about these issues have risen above the national level. European Union regulation of working time should lead to convergence. But paradoxically the implementation of this principle through a Directive means that national differences are emphasised. Within this dynamic context, issues of time and management and the management of time are urgently under review. In this special issue we draw together analyses of these issues from across the European Union. We present a model of hora management as a vehicle to understand changing patterns of time management within the setting of the societal approach. The societal approach attempts to link organisational developments to a wider institutional context as defined by the professional, organisational and domestic spaces and the interrelationship between them but within the European environment. The call for papers for this special issue attracted contributions from France, Germany, The Netherlands and the UK. The papers cover a variety of angles, some emphasising the organisational space, others the professional or domestic space. In combination, they suggest that hora management could be a useful concept to understand better the actions of governments, managers and workers. The simultaneously different and similar experiences in the countries studied also cries out for further analysis at the European level.

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The concept of hora management has been inspired by the three benevolent Greek deities who served as guardians of work. As their task was to make time roll on, they made sure that people gathered the fruits of their toil at the right moment. These three inseparable sisters, Dike, Eirene and Eunomia, represented justice, peace and good order and covered their entire society. Their presence served a social dimension as they watched over the works of the mortals and gave them the wealth they deserved. The purpose of hora management is the ability to cope with multiple chronological codes within organisations and with those between the three spaces, professional, organisational and domestic. Hora management invites managers to broaden their scope on time and space and stand up to the pragmatic time arrangements employees are striving for. Hora management is therefore meant to find effective combinations of flexibility of and flexibility for the worker and thus achieve the combination of wealth and well-being sought by the ancient Greeks. About the Guest Editors John Leopold is Associate Dean of Nottingham Business School and Professor and Head of Department of Human Resource Management. His research interest in time and management was stimulated through long standing collaboration with Luchien Karsten. Other research interests include comparative study of managing the employment relationship on greenfield sites, public sector modernisation and employee relations in the NHS, and trade unions and the Labour Party. Luchien Karsten is Professor in the Foundations of Management Thinking, Faculty of Management and Organisation, University of Groningen. Having been trained as an economist and philosopher, his research interests in time were developed through his doctoral thesis on the eight-hour day. Subsequent research has focused on the actual development of time-space orientation in organisations. Additionally, he is interested in management concepts that are used to describe and analyse time and space in organisations. He is a member of the editorial board of a Dutch journal on management and philosophy.

The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0048-3486.htm

Time and management: the need for hora management Luchien Karsten Faculty of Management and Organisation, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands, and

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John Leopold Department of HRM, Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK Keywords Time management, Work, Regulations, European Union, Model Abstract Working time patterns are moving away from the traditional pattern of regularity, standardisation and co-ordination to a new triptych of individualism, heterogeneity and irregularity. Seeks to make sense of these changes through the concept of hora management as an approach to manage the interface between temporally asymmetric domains of organisational and domestic space mediated through the space of professional relations. Drawing on the societal approach, defines the three spaces – professional relations, organisational and domestic – and builds a model of their inter-relationship that incorporates the supranational impact of the European Union. Organisational citizenship will require managers to pursue family-friendly policies and recognise that time spent in one domain cannot be equated with time spent in another. Hora management offers a way of managing these tensions and contradictions.

Introduction The industrialised world is apparently moving away from a once generally embraced combined notion of regularity, standardisation, and co-ordination, which during the industrialisation of western society uniformly arranged working time patterns. Admittedly, the experience of full-time, permanent, secure employment by the mass of the workforce is a relatively recent phenomenon, and one only characteristic of large scale, highly capitalised economies with long range processes of economic growth (Felstead and Jewson, 1999). Over the centuries the clock has in this context dramatically influenced the organisation of social life “by shifting the emphasis of every day living and working patterns from variable rhythms to invariant ones” (Adam, 1995, p. 47). Notions of regularity, standardisation and co-ordination have been culturally determined and therefore are liable to shift under specific socio-cultural changes. The establishment of the standard working week and standard working day has been central to the evolution of our modern employment system. As Glennie and Thrift (1996) have shown, time awareness and timeorientation, which in everyday life structure living patterns in a regular way, The authors acknowledge the contribution of David Alis in developing this framework. A detailed version of the arguement is to be found in Karsen et al. (2001) or in Alis et al. (2003).

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Figure 1. Examples of different forms of time discipline

did not have to await the introduction of the factory to become common practice. Neither did the need for co-ordination only arise once standardised factory production had become a general feature. They illustrate this with the help of a Venn diagram showing how regularity, standardisation and co-ordination have throughout the history of the industrialising western world created interconnected relationships which varied over time (see Figure 1). One of the most remarkable socio-cultural results of the interconnectedness between regularity, standardisation and co-ordination has been the introduction of the eight-hour day. This regulated the division between labour and free time and supported the standardisation of the working hours and synchronised shopfloor activities (Karsten, 1989). However, the industrialised world is currently undergoing a process of desynchronisation, which means that the so-called flexible production regimes “involve much more intense co-ordination, but sharply diminished requirements for standardisation and regularity” (Glennie and Thrift, 1996, p. 287). We might say that the triptych individualism/heterogeneity/irregularity begins to replace the former one (Boulin, 1992). However, each industrialised nation has so far followed a different path. Some believe that countries will move away from standard employment arrangements and promote less regularity to create a setting for “portfolio

people offering their skills to many different clients and customers, moving between different working places, working from home using modern technology” (Felstead and Jewson, 1999, p. 3). Others fear that in the industrialised and service-oriented countries low-paid employees might become the victims of the dissolutions of regularity and standardisation and will no longer enjoy adequate employment protection. National institutional frameworks have so far embedded traditional and modern forms of the three-pronged intensity of time discipline as depicted in the Venn diagram (see Figure 1). For more than two centuries there has been a steady reduction in the time spent at work, a decline that has been regulated by both collective agreements and legislation (Blair et al., 2001). Although from country to country the details may differ, the general direction was the same: working time diminished. The flexibilisation of working time, however, is beginning to change this general development. Part-time and shift work, as well as weekend and evening work, represent new forms of working patterns. The increase of non-standard, deregulated and irregular forms of employment will not fit the existing temporal schemes of standard employment and co-ordination mechanisms. In the organisational space of businesses, striving for more flexibility will create new forms of organising practices matching new working time patterns such as that being caused by part-time work. Ingrained habits and attitudes of traditional patterns will need to change and companies will have to respond to the situation. In order to understand the effects of flexibility better we will have to study the linkages between different socio-economic spaces as they together embed working time arrangements. For that purpose we will use the societal approach. The societal approach In the 1980s the societal approach based on a cross-cultural point of view became popular. This perspective resisted simultaneously models that explained socio-economic development with a framework that pretended universal applicability ignoring country and actor specificities within particular institutional settings, and also those that underlined cultural differences as the explanators of their perspective. O’Reilly (2000, p. 343) states that: [. . .] the societal effect represented a significant challenge to universal theories about the process of modernisation and industrialisation resulting in convergence. It challenged the assumptions that technological determinism, capitalism or [. . .] globalization, would produce similar effects in modern industrial societies.

This approach argues that the socialisation process through historically embedded institutions produces a distinct societal effect in the organisation of work in different countries.

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The societal approach strives for a broader general picture – it has a holistic perspective – which makes it possible to link the micro level of the firm with national institutional settings at macro-level. It respects the interactions between the micro- and macro-level and considers the society as a real community constructed by social actors and not as resulting from a blind interplay of impersonal forces. Certain practices among human beings can take on something of a life of their own once they have become part of everyday life. In the case of working time arrangements we can notice “that certain time-competences can become increasingly independent from the particular sources of time-discipline from which they originate” (Glennie and Thrift, 1996, p. 289). It is up to (groups of) actors to decide whether or not specific patterns and habits are reproduced. With The´ret (2000) we can therefore say that societies are the result of the interplay between social actors within three orders of practices which have their own repertoires of action: (1) the economic order which is determined by the repertoire of capital accumulation; (2) the political order which is governed by power accumulation; and (3) the domestic order which is determined by social reproduction. We do not agree with The´ret, however, that these orders of practice survive through their own logic but that they are the result of interplay between social actors. The persistence of a society based on these three orders is dependent on a set of institutions ensuring the functional reproduction of each order, but is at the same time determined by social actors that reproduce the repertoires of action while creating tensions, paradoxes and incongruencies. Any society therefore needs communication mechanisms or interaction between the social actors upholding the regimes of regulation of the three separate orders and a mode of regulation of the society at large in order to articulate all these regimes within a historically situated territorial space. We have transferred this general societal perspective to the specific repertoire of working time arrangements to understand its specific developments: (1) The space of professional relations is constituted by the social partners: employers-organisations, trade unions and state authorities. They are, in varying constellations, involved in discussing and arranging working time patterns. (2) The organisational space examines the strategies of firms and sectors to improve their competitiveness. For a long time people have tried to structure firms according to the clock time regime which facilitates context independence and global standardisation. Adam (1995, p. 25) notices, however, that the context independence of the clock time has

been traded off “against meaning, qualitative difference and harmony with natural and social rhythms”. Companies have to take decisions for their survival and advancement by producing, distributing and selling in time. Organisations develop repertoires of rules, structures and forms of action to meet the varying rhythms of demand competition and regulation. (3) The domestic space focuses on “the dialectic interplay between the taskoriented time of the home and the clock time of activities in the workplace” (Ingold, 1995, p. 17). Harvey (1999, pp. 22-3) has clearly identified that the concept of time prevalent in the domain of organisational space cannot simply be transferred to the domestic space. He comes to the conclusion that the temporal co-ordination sequencing, articulation of work/labour, whether paid or unpaid, formal of informal, establish diverse regularities and cycles and thereby constitute particular temporalities. Firms begin to understand the effects of this dialectic by providing family-friendly views in their human resources (HR) policies, which make them more attractive to potential employees.

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Here we attempt to develop a model which takes all three domains into consideration in an integrated way. The effects of the interdependencies will in the end result in new forms of embeddedness of time arrangements. In Figure 2 the three domains (spaces) are related to each other. However, we have to expand the model to integrate a supranational aspect which in the specific case of working time necessitates an understanding of the impact of the Working Time Directive (WTD) and other related Directives.

Figure 2. Socio-economic space

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The European WTD The societal approach has so far focused on comparative studies between countries, trying to locate divergence. The constitution of the European Union (EU) and the particular position of the European Commission (EC) within that Union have not yet been reflected in this approach. The role of the EU has to be perceived as an entity promoting convergence. Although any directive of the EU will have to be transcribed into the national system of industrial relations it still plays an overarching role. Within the EU the central platform for HR issues is the Community Charter of Fundamental Social Rights of Workers, the so-called Social Chapter, and the Social Action Programme to implement it. In the 1990s the influence of interventionists grew and willingness among the social partners of the EU (trade unions, employer organisations, governments) was created to start a social dialogue to create flexible labour-markets and promote entrepreneurship and job creation in order to solve problems of unemployment. This finally led to the Amsterdam Treaty, which introduced an Employment Chapter into the EC Treaty encouraging entrepreneurial freedom and more flexible labour markets. This strategy is based on four pillars: (1) Employability to cover the skills gap in Europe. (2) Adaptability to strengthen the capacity of workers to meet the challenges of change. (3) Entrepreneurship to create a new entrepreneurial culture by encouraging self-employment (4) Equal opportunities to promote that men and women have equal responsibility and opportunities in family and working life. The WTD was adopted in November 1993 and its main provisions are intended to limit maximum working hours and establish minimum entitlements to rest periods and paid annual leave for most workers in the EU. The WTD has all kinds of implications on the interdependencies between the three social spaces we have identified in Figure 2. The societal approach framework has to be extended to include the impact of the WTD and other EU Directives that might impact on these relationships. We illustrate this development in Figure 3. Most member states had national working hour legislation in place, which were more restrictive than the WTD. The spirit of the WTD, however, forces employers while planning work organisation (article 13 of the WTD) to “take account of the general principle of adapting work to the worker with a view in particular to alleviating monotonous work and work at a predetermined workrate depending on the type of activity and of health and safety requirements especially as regards breaks during working time”. Other Directives of the EU about works councils, parental leave (1995), part-time work (1997), labour contracts for a determinate period (1999), labour arranged by agencies (2001),

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Figure 3. Impact of the European Directives on the socio-economic space

and telework (2002) can be seen as steps which reinforce processes of convergence and have an impact of the relationships between the three spaces. Organisational citizenship Clock-time, the organisational time-frame and structure of industrial production, is governed by the non-temporal principle of time, a time that tracks and measures motion but is indifferent to change [. . .] As such, clock-time forms an integral part of contemporary western societies’ time consciousness. Time efficiency, time budgeting, time management, they all belong to the clock-time conceptualisation of time (Adam 1995, p. 52).

Managers seek a unifying orientation to time in an attempt to master it. They are driven by the holy trinity: (1) to measure is to know; (2) to know is to predict; and (3) to predict is to control. They therefore impose organisational rules like time ordering systems to establish a compelling image of the future (Rifkin 1987, p. 123). It is their purpose to convince employees of sacrificing their own time in order that they might gain access to something that lies beyond their immediate time horizon. But by focusing on clock-time frameworks only, managers disregard temporalities that fall outside the hegemony of commodified time.

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Organisations, however, have to deal with an increasing variety of working time arrangements which ask for an integration of flexibility of and flexibility for employees (Elchardus and Heyvaert, 1990). This diversity is the result of changing attitudes of employees, trying to cope with interdependencies between labour time and care time, working hours and training, etc.: People encounter ever greater difficulties in co-ordinating the flexible and inflexible elements of their lives of work, family, friends, leisure, cultural activities, public amenities use and political engagement. The more flexible and/or unpredictable the work pattern, the more time has to be spent by those involved and their families on the task of synchronisation (Adam, 1995, p. 104).

The gender dimension of part-time work makes us aware of the fact that other temporalities begin to play an essential role in the structuring of working time arrangements. Although working time itself may have diminished, work is still being experienced by women and men as an essential part of life. However, employees ask organisations to respect the fact that traditional separations between standard labour time and free time, between organisational space and domestic space, no longer hold. New policies of working time arrangements should not only reflect changing views on working habits of men and women and their responsibilities in the domestic space, but they also should introduce new ways to define linkages between organisational space and domestic space and shape frameworks to enhance commitments. It is not the free market, which defines the interactions between space of professional relations, organisational space and domestic space, but the civil society which determines these interactions. Marshall (1950, in Katz, 2001) argued that the development of the civil society has expanded in three stages during the previous two centuries. Civil/legal citizenship emerged first in the eighteenth century as the early capitalist system developed institutions for the protection of property, the freedom of thought and speech and equality before the law. Political citizenship followed in the nineteenth century with the franchise i.e. the right to participate in the exercise of political power. By the late 1940s Marshall saw a third stage introducing social citizenship, which guarantees the right to a minimum standard of social and economic welfare. Social citizenship was meant to live “the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevailing in the society”. Social citizenship took shape as the welfare state without national borders. The development of the welfare state did not lead to equal opportunities for women. Women initially gained less than the full rights of social citizenship. Social citizenship nowadays poses conceptual difficulties when it has to be applied within the context of international entities like the EU (Katz, 2001). There is, however, a fourth stage of citizenship appearing which we call organisational citizenship (Grint, 1997). This concept tries to secure social

integration and the right of participation in the running of an organisation for all organisational participants involved. Figure 4 illustrates the four stages of citizenship. Organisational citizenship takes into consideration the shift from what political scientists have called a vote-centric to a talk-centric approach. The vote-centric perspective departed from the fact that fixed pre-existing preferences and interests compete through fair decision procedures to reach a settlement. This approach, we concluded, limits the role of minority groups within ethnic culturally diverse modern societies. Therefore a talk-centric approach has to be embraced which respects diversity and allows minorities to participate actively in any formation of opinions, e.g. in defining new working time arrangements (Kymlicka and Norman, 2000). Organisational citizenship has already been conceptualised by organisational psychologists (Smith et al., 1983, p. 653) who presume that “every factory, office, or bureau depends daily on a myriad of acts of co-operation, helpfulness, suggestions, gestures of goodwill and altruism”. Dyne and Graham (1994, p. 765) have extended the concept to cover not only “in-role job performance behaviours, [and] organisationally functional extrarole behaviours [but also] political behaviours, such as full and responsible organisational participation”. This substantive organisational citizenship implies a balanced network of reciprocity between organisations and their members. If for example patterns of behaviour within the domestic space change, organisations incorporating organisational citizenship will have to respond accordingly. With activities such as work-family policies, ethics compliance programmes, corporate volunteerism and green marketing and topics like social justice (Organ and Ryan, 1995) and corporate social responsibility (Maignan et al., 1999; Maignan and Ferrell, 2000) companies begin to show their commitment to organisational citizenship.

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Figure 4. Four stages of citizenship

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Hora management If managers take organisational citizenship seriously and pursue family friendly policies, they will – as we believe – have to embrace a new view on time management. Time management has concentrated on scheduling time patterns by encouraging “temporal complementarity among temporally asymmetric worlds” (Zerubavel, 1981, p. 60). Household time, however, is structured by sequences of tasks rather than quantities of hours. Harvey (1999, pp. 23 and 35) believes that “the use of chronometric time as a standard, and unique, measure of activities structured within diverse temporalities, runs the risk of reductionism, and of wrongly equating an hour spent under one temporal organization with an hour spent in another”. We should therefore question the assumption “that time in one domain can in any simple or straightforward manner be traded or exchanged with time in another domain”. In order to cope with these temporally asymmetric domains we would like to introduce the concept of hora management. This concept is inspired by the classic Greek notion of horai. The early Greeks felt that different portions of time had different qualities (Onians, 1988). In the Middle Ages Europeans still had “a system of unequal, accordion-pleated hours that puffed up and deflated so as to ensure a dozen hours each for daytime and night time, winter and summer” (Crosby, 1997, p. 32). We do not have the intention of going back to the Middle Ages to restructure working time arrangements. The advantage of horai, however, is that it makes us aware of the fact that batches of hours that are confined to specific tasks or activities can vary in meaning and importance. Our idea about horai as a relevant concept is inspired by the metaphor Simon (1996, p. 188) once introduced. In his parable Simon explains why the watchmaker Hora was able to arrange the production process of watches efficiently while Tempus failed. Hora clustered specific sets of parts together, so that any interruption only spoiled one cluster and not the complete production process. The same principle will uphold for working time arrangements being based on hora management. Instead of presuming that every employee provides the same kind of working time, which can then be scheduled according to company schemes, hora management respects the fact that batches of hours can have different temporal characteristics. Hora management will confine batches of hours to particular tasks and develop a sensitivity for multiple temporalities and different time arrangements. Hora management respects the fact that employees have to match different chronological time regimes with those of their respective organisations. These chronological time regimes will be influenced by rhythms of the bodies of the workers. Physical powers of human beings vary according to their age and should not only be perceived as a uniform source of energy. The existence of multiple chronological codes in organisations suggests that rather than time being independent of events – as time management does by using a language that bears the hallmarks of a homogeneous ordering of time

being amendable to singular, rational measurement of speed (Whipp, 1994) – it is actually shaped by the events: time is in the events. Clark (1990) assumes that organisational time is based on heterogeneous codes derived from diverse discontinuous social events to meet the varying rhythms of demand, competition and regulation, including those from the reproductive space. Instead of a homogeneous time on which the structure of an organisational structure is based (i.e. clock time patterns with their regular events) hora management focuses on trajectories of events which will respect interactions between organisational and reproductive time patterns (Bluedorn and Denhardt, 1988). The purpose of hora management is the ability to cope with multiple chronological codes within organisations and with those between the three spaces we have introduced in Figures 2 and 3. Hora management invites managers to broaden their scope on time and stand up to the pragmatic time arrangements employees are striving for. Hora management is meant to find effective combinations of flexibilisation from the workplace, and time sovereignty from the employee perspective. Having established this need for hora management as an approach to manage the interface between the temporally asymmetric domains of organisational and domestic space mediated through the space of professional relations, we can now use this to structure the articles that make up this special issue. The pieces by Harris and by Tietze and Musson both address the practice of home-based teleworking, but one from the perspective of the employing organisation, the other from the perspective of the individual. Both examine the interface between organisational and domestic space and how this shapes actual regimes of working time arrangements. The Harris article is a study of a UK-based international drinks firm that unilaterally decided that its entire sales staff should become home-based teleworkers. It reports the experience of these workers in the first year of operation of the new policy. Staff felt abandoned by their managers in the move from office-based to home-based work. Initially some 20 per cent of staff left. In exploring the complex interface between the domains of work and home life, the author concludes that individual circumstances require close attention before implementing home-based working. Teleworking raises challenges for both employers and employees in establishing fresh boundaries between work time, non-work time and legitimate availability. Issues that need to be addressed include the demarcation of work time and family time, the lack of space (both physical and temporal) to work undisturbed and a resultant extension to the working day. She suggests that line managers need to recalibrate their perceptions of the boundaries between home and work in order that positive employee relationships might develop within a new paradigm of “home-work” relations. In particular they may need to rethink traditional views that employers do not get involved in employees’ personal lives as this may be seen as an invasion of privacy. The very act of relocating work to home is a

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major breach of that view and having made such a move employers need to take more responsibility in supporting their employees in dealing with the resultant issues. Tietze and Musson also explore the interface between organisational and domestic space and argue that home-based telework juxtaposes two previously geographically distinct cultural arenas and their respective temporal orders. At this interface they conclude that organisational clock time continues to provide a regulated and controllable order. However, simultaneously, task time affords teleworking families some contingent, flexible decision making beyond the control of internal disciplines. They examine these issues drawing on detailed case studies of 25 management professional teleworkers and their families. They establish that “time is money” is the central metaphor that characterises the organisation of industrial production and is the underlying principle that informs, shapes and expresses the practices and (work) patterns of social and organisational life. By contrast they establish that the household is defined by more fluid, cyclic temporal boundaries where time is lived, made and generated rather than measured, spent, allocated and controlled. Importantly for our model of the boundaries between organisational and domestic space and time, they also argue that the household’s temporal boundaries are simultaneously subject to the commodified temporalities of the wider institutional context. In home-based telework, Tietze and Musson believe that the spatial/temporal map of the work organisation is increasingly evolving into the household and they argue that this is more than a mere physical relocation, but implies the meeting of two previously distinct meaning worlds. Based on their 25 case studies, they explore the tensions of their co-existence. The model advanced above in Figures 2 and 3 has a role for professional relations, that is relations between government and social partners in regulating the relationship between organisational and domestic space. The Netherlands is an excellent example of a nation where such tripartite arrangements have been in existence. The paper by Remery, van DoorneHuiskes and Schippers explores issues related to the reconciliation of work and care in that country and the tripartite involvement of government, employers and workers themselves in establishing this. First they establish that the “one and a half earners” model is an established feature of the Dutch labour market and a pattern of participation that is particular to The Netherlands with 53 per cent of Dutch households falling into this category in 2000. They contend that the emergence of this pattern of working has led the Dutch government to consider how work in organisations and care in the home might best be supported and facilitated leading to the 2001 Work and Care Act and other measures which in combination constitute the framework for employers and unions to negotiate family friendly policies. Indeed, in the Dutch system, it is expected that the social partners will negotiate extensions to the minima laid down in the legislation thus underscoring the tripartite and consensual basis of the Dutch system. However,

during the 1990s there was a move towards collective agreements on these topics being procedural in nature and leaving plenty of scope for organisations to decide whether or not to make additional provisions. The authors then draw on a data set of 871 organisations in the service sector to establish the existence (or not) of particular types of work-care schemes. They argue that Dutch employers are aware of their share in the tripartite responsibility for the supply of family friendly facilities. Around two-thirds of organisations have flexible starting and finishing times and hour saving schemes, but these are not necessarily directly related to facilitate the combination of work and care and only some of them offer workers time sovereignty. Around half encourage part-time work; have childcare schemes, or emergency leave schemes. All other schemes are minority practices, but only 4 per cent of organisations have no scheme at all. They attempt to establish whether factors related to the organisation’s own employees, the organisation’s direct environment, or its wider environment are key to determining the existence of different schemes. They conclude that factors related to the organisation’s own employees are the most important, but this does not flow from any detailed cost benefit analysis. They believe that employers “go with the flow” in a pragmatic way and that this is related to the Dutch search for consensus. However, they conclude that the combination of weaker labour market conditions, and the lack of strong leadership on these issues from the government, means that the third leg of the tripartite policy, the employees themselves, will have to take the initiative if there are to be further developments in establishing an effective strategy for reconciling work and family life. The paper by Rosendaal examines features of part-time work and workers, also in The Netherlands. Based on a survey of around 1,700 respondents working seven hours or more, he examines and analyses job features such as knowledge intensity, connectivity with other people in the organisation and standardisation, and relates these to the task and contextual performance of employees working different hours. He also considers features of the job environment such as stability, flexibility of working schedule and the communication infrastructure. The main finding is that it is not part-time work per se that leads to different outcomes in terms of these features, but the number of hours involved. There is a clear break at 20 hours. Part-time workers working up to 19 hours per week are more isolated, the jobs are more standardised and ask for less knowledge and skills. Rosendaal suggests that such workers may be less affected by boredom and avoidance behaviour than people doing the same jobs for longer. By contrast part-time work over 20 hours seems to be more similar to full-time jobs. However, there is a difference between shopfloor workers on the one hand, and managers and specialists on the other. From this Rosendaal argues that jobs with hours less than 19 and good performance go hand in hand as long as the jobs are well structured,

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knowledge extensive and do not require intensive communication with clients or other stakeholders over longer periods. However, more complex jobs need a minimum time to be effective; indeed he suggests that professional and managerial work is mostly only feasible in a working week of more than two-and-a-half days. The paper by Singe and Croucher focuses on the organisational domain, but one where there has been a deregulation and decentralisation of decision making from the professional sphere. They examine the emergence and experience of trust-based working time (TBWT) systems in German organisations, whereby managers formally devolve their responsibility for monitoring time to workers, or teams of workers, and in so doing, some aspects of the regulation of working time may be evaded. There is a shift from a timebased to a results-based orientation. They argue that the very regulation of working time through both the state and the social partners in the professional space has led to managers in the organisational space seeking to find new ways of improving labour flexibility in the face of increased global competition. If this move is successful, then the boundaries between the spheres of work and life, or in our terminology between organisational and domestic space, will become blurred. Although TBWT is a relatively recent phenomenon it is practised by some major organisations such as IBM and Siemens, and supported by management consultants such as Hoff, and by government. Trade unions remain critical and sceptical. Singe and Croucher analyse the factors of management structure and style, external and internal pressures on companies, and the existence or not of effective employee representation as they see these as crucial in the future of TBWT. They conclude that the extensive use of such systems is not likely as they require these to be present and that the appropriate combination of these factors is not widespread. While these conditions are more likely to be found in large companies there are simultaneously counter indicators such as moves to centralised control and that some managers are increasingly sceptical about employee representation. These counter tendencies would inhibit the spread of TBWS in Germany and the outcome of these tensions needs to be explored further. In the context of our framework, it is also clear that there is tension between the organisational and domestic spheres and that the existing regime of regulation in the professional sphere is under strain. The final paper focuses on France and the experience in organisations of the introduction of the 35-hour working week. Alis examines the relationship between regulation in the space of professional relations and the outcomes in organisations. He argues that there is a paradox between France maintaining an interventionary state which eventually introduced a statutory 35-hour week and the consequence of this leading to an unprecedented outburst of collective bargaining to secure the implementation of the new hours in specific companies. Alis traces the background to the Aubry laws of 1998 and 2000 which introduced the 35-hour week. In so doing he explores the shift in public policy

concern about working hours from being focussed on improving working and living conditions to a focus on the flexibility of the worker, and the initiative being taken by employers rather than unions or the state. The model for doing this, the Robien law, was one based on the state providing incentives for employers to act. The post-1997 socialist government shifted from incentives to compulsion through the two Aubry laws continuing a tradition of strong state intervention in the sphere of working time dating back to 1936 with the 40-hour week and 1982 with the 39-hour week. But there was one major difference. These laws preceded but activated negotiations at both industry and company level. The government, through state aid, influenced both the timing and content of collective agreements. The state provided aid, companies sought productivity gains through reorganisations, while employees had to accept increased levels of flexibility and wage moderation. Examples in each of these areas are explored. Unless companies wished to forego state aid, negotiations at company level were a requirement. But historically levels of unionisation and of local level bargaining were low in France. Anticipating problems in this area the law permitted employees mandating agreements on working hours locally. At the same time trade unions were unwilling to engage in concession bargaining over changes in working hours, so employers have adopted the practice of referendums to secure agreement on proposed changes. In these ways within France there have been dramatic changes in the professional and organisational space and the relations between them in regulating regimes of working time arrangements. Thus in this special issue we are able to demonstrate the utility of our framework for examining and evaluating working time in the context of the societal approach. This permits us to analyse in detail the evidence from these case studies and analyses from France, Germany, The Netherlands and the UK. It forms a basis for further evaluation and examination of the space occupied by the professional, organisational and domestic domains and the interrelationship between them. The evidence suggest that hora management could be a useful concept with which to understand and explain the actions of governments, managers and workers. Finally, the simultaneously different and similar experiences in the countries studied also cries out for further understanding and analysis at the European level.

References Adam, B. (1995), Time Watch. The Social Analysis of Time, Polity Press, London. Alis, D., Leopold, J. and Karsten, L. (2003), “Flexible working and the regulation of working time in the European Union: a comparison of three countries”, paper presented at the Seventh Conference on International Human Resource Management, Limerick.

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Blair, A., Karsten, L. and Leopold, J. (2001), “The European Working Time Directive and its effect on flexibility within organisations: a British-Dutch comparative analysis”, in Morello, G., Adams, B. and Sabelis, I. (Eds), Time and Management, ISIDA, Palermo. Bluedorn, A.C. and Denhardt, R.B. (1988), “Time and organisations”, Journal of Management, Vol. 14 No. 2. Boulin, J.Y. (1992), “Les politiques du temps de travail en France: la perte du sens”, Futuribles, pp. 165-6. Clark, P. (1990), “Chronological codes and organisational analysis”, in Hassard, J. and Pym, D. (Eds), The Theory and Philosophy of Organisations, Routledge, London. Crosby, A.W. (1997), The Measure of Reality: Qualification and Western Society 1250-1600, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Dyne, L.V. and Graham, J.W. (1994), “Organizational citizenship behaviour”, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 37 No. 4. Elchardus, M. and Heyvaert, P. (1990), Soepel, Flexibel en Ongebonden:een Vergelijking van Twee Laat-moderne Generaties, VUB Press, Brussels. Felstead, A. and Jewson, N. (Eds) (1999), Global Trends in Flexible Labour, Macmillan, London. Glennie, P. and Thrift, N. (1996), “Reworking E.P. Thompson’s “Time, Work-discipline and Industrial Capitalism””, Time and Society, Vol. 5 No. 3, pp. 275-99. Grint, K. (1997), Fuzzy Management, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Harvey, M. (1999), “Economics of time: a framework for analysing the restructuring of employment relations”, in Felstead, A. and Jewson, N. (Eds), Global Trends in Flexible Labour, Macmillan, London. Ingold, T. (1995), “Work, time and industry”, Time and Society, Vol. 4 No. 1, pp. 5-28. Karsten, L. (1989), De Achturendag, International Institute of Social History Publications, Amsterdam. Karsen, L., Alis, D. and Leopold, J. (2001), “Working time arrangements mediated through different socio-economic spaces in three European countries: implications for management”, paper presented at the EGOS Conference, Lyon. Katz, M.B. (2001), The Price of Citizenship, Metropolitan Books, New York, NY. Kymlicka, W. and Norman, W. (2000), Citizenship in Diverse Societies, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Maignan, I. and Ferrell, O.C. (2000), “Measuring corporate citizenship in two countries: the case of the United States and France”, Journal of Business Ethics, No. 23. Maignan, I., Ferrell, O.C. and Hult, G.T.M. (1999), “Corporate citizenship: cultural antecedents and business benefits”, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Vol. 27 No. 4. Onians, R.B. (1988), The Origins of European Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. O’Reilly, I. (2000), “Is it time to gender the societal effect?”, in Maurice, M. and Sorge, A. (Eds), Embedding Organizations, John Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam. Organ, D.W. and Ryan, K. (1995), “A meta-analytic review of attitudinal and dispositional predictors of organizational citizenship behavior”, Personnel Psychology, Vol. 48 No. 4. Rifkin, J. (1987), Time Wars, H. Holt and Company, New York, NY. Simon, H.A. (1996), The Sciences of the Artificial, MIT, Cambridge, MA. Smith, A.C., Organ, D.W. and Weaz, J.P. (1983), “Organizational citizenship behavior: its nature and antecedents”, Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 68 No. 4.

The´ret, B. (2000), “Theoretical problems in international comparisons”, in Maurice, M. and Sorge, A. (Eds), Embedding Organisations, John Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam. Whipp, R. (1994), “A time to be concerned”, Time and Society, Vol. 3 No. 1. Zerubavel, E. (1981), Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Further reading Maurice, M. and Sorge, A. (Eds) (2000), Embedding Organizations, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam. O’Reilly, I., Cebria´n, I. and Lallement, M. (2000), Working Time Changes, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Organ, D.W. and Konovsky, M (1989), “Cognitive versus affection determinants of organizational citizenship behaviour”, Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 74, p. 1.

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The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0048-3486.htm

Home-based teleworking and the employment relationship Managerial challenges and dilemmas Lynette Harris Department of Human Resource Management, Nottingham Business School, The Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK Keywords Teleworking, Employee relations, Trust, Management, Responsibility, United Kingdom Abstract As home-based teleworking grows in the UK, more evidence is needed of how working from home shapes the employment relationship and the implications this may have for those line managers responsible for a home-based workforce. The reported experiences of a sales team and their line managers at one large international drinks manufacturing company of teleworking during its first year of operation revealed the importance of developing understanding of the complex interface between the domains of work and home life. The findings suggest individual circumstances require close attention before implementing home-based working with line managers recalibrating perceptions of the boundaries between home and work for positive employee relationships to develop within a new paradigm of “home-work” relations.

The home-based working agenda Technological advances have led to teleworking from home (also referred to as remote or mobile working) rising on the public policy agenda (Apgar, 1999). It is a form of temporal flexible working likely to attract increasing attention as the work/life balance debate intensifies. In the UK, such initiatives have received encouragement from the present government’s stated commitment to family-friendly policies (Cully et al., 1998) reflected in recent employment legislation. While home-based teleworking is still in its infancy, it is identified as a growing trend (Brocklehurst, 2001) although establishing the extent of its actual practice is hampered by the lack of a universal definition. For the purposes of discussion, the UK’s Labour Force Survey (LFS) definition of teleworkers as “people who do some paid or unpaid work in their own home and who use both a telephone and computer” will be used in this paper. This specifically includes those who: . mainly work from home in their main job; . work from home in various locations, but home is their base (as in the reported study). Personnel Review Vol. 32 No. 4, 2003 pp. 422-437 q MCB UP Limited 0048-3486 DOI 10.1108/00483480310477515

LFS statistics identify teleworking growing rapidly in the UK and other European Union (EU) countries, but even more dramatically in the USA (Hotopp, 2002). The number of UK teleworkers in spring 2001 was reported as 2.2 million (7.4 per cent of the total labour force of whom three-quarters work in

the private sector) with an average 13 per cent increase per year since 1997. While the feminisation of the workforce would seem to be an explanatory factor in its growth (Felstead et al., 2002, p. 58), currently two-thirds of all teleworkers are men. Teleworking is predicted as a likely direction for organisational development (Pieperl and Baruch, 1997; Chesborough and Teece, 1996). The Institute of Employment Studies estimates the UK uses only 30 per cent of its teleworking potential and that new technologies will further increase the possibilities for home-based working (Huws et al., 2001). Despite the present and predicted growth in teleworking, the impact of “blurring” the temporal and spatial boundaries between home and work on the employment relationship and the challenges it presents for managers with human resource (HR) management responsibilities is under researched. This paper sets out to examine this through the experiences of a sales force at one large international drinks manufacturing company, BC Drinks Ltd who became home-based teleworkers. Home-based teleworking at BC Drinks BC Drinks adopted a policy of home-based teleworking in 1999 which was implemented the following year for a sales team of 41 staff as a result of the closure of the company’s northern regional office in the largest of its geographical areas in the UK. The form of remote working implemented at BC Drinks was one where the employee’s home had become the contractual place of work with occasional meetings at a designated premises (Huws, 1996), although the nature of the sales team’s work involved regular travelling to visit customers. Home working removed not only a shared office base for the team, but also the administrative support provided by two clerical staff. The sales team was entirely male with the exception of two recent female recruits, one of whom was married. Three-quarters of the team were below 45 years of age with young families and the average length of service with the company was seven years although one-third had ten years’ service or more. Although studies have reported that teleworking on a part-time basis produces the best outcomes for both parties in the employment relationship (Baruch, 2001), at BC Drinks partial home working was not offered as an option. The employer-led initiative was an “all or nothing” situation and essentially irreversible once the regional office was removed. While possible problems of isolation, self-discipline and motivation were expected by the company’s management, the difficulties reported by employees as a result of work being relocated into the domestic domain were not dominated by those anticipated by the employer. Based on the responses of the sales team and their line managers, this paper examines the experience of a group of employees faced with adjusting to what Daly (1996, p. 149) describes as a “new set of temporal demands”. It particularly explores:

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those problems most frequently identified in moving the office into the home environment; the impact this had on the psychological contract employees felt they had with their employer; and the implications for managers responsible for home-based staff.

424 The methodology A company survey was conducted six months after teleworking began. An internally designed questionnaire explored seven areas: the physical environment, productivity, balancing home and work life, socialisation, communication, tools and general issues. Anxiety about staff turnover and a largely negative employee response led to another questionnaire, addressing the same areas, six months later to see whether there had been any changes in views of home-based working. The second survey revealed no change in the essential concerns of employees other than a hardening of attitudes towards their employer and the management of the move to home-based working. Both questionnaires provided for open responses to most questions, which allowed the same themes to reappear, but did not explore in any depth employees’ concerns. This may be partly explained by a reluctance on the part of the employer to probe into aspects of family circumstances viewed as a matter of personal privacy (Campbell Clark, 2000) even when these had been initially identified by the employee. To obtain more qualitative insights, two focus groups with sales staff and two attended by sales staff and their managers were observed. Individual interviews were conducted with one-quarter of the teleworkers and their managers with the sample selected to reflect differing lengths of service and, where known, family circumstances. Respondents were encouraged during the focus groups and interviews to describe their experiences from the perspective of their own working context (Burgess, 1982). The ensuing narratives provided a richness of detail, which supplemented the data obtained by the company questionnaires. The reported findings are drawn from the responses to the questionnaires, the focus group meetings and the interviews conducted during and immediately after the first year of the scheme’s operation. While the findings from one case study organisation cannot offer widely applicable conclusions, they illustrate that perceptions about home as a substitute workplace requires closer examination before embarking on fullscale home-based working. A recognised limitation of this study is that it examines the employee experience of home-based teleworking during its initial year of operation when it could be expected most problems of adjustment would occur. Nevertheless, it reveals that for the majority of the sales team the level of trust placed in the employer’s concern for their well-being had been eroded and would be difficult, if not impossible, to restore. In this way, the study identifies issues all employers would be advised to address in the design

and implementation of home-based working schemes if they are seeking to retain and enhance commitment to the organisation. An employer- or employee-led initiative? The benefits of home-based working for employers appear self-evident; these are regularly reported as greater productivity, reduced accommodation costs, lower absenteeism and improved customer services (Jackson and van der Wielen, 1998). The most frequently stated organisational reasons for introducing remote working are a more effective use of resources, providing flexible working options for employees, reducing travelling time and optimising the use of technology (IDS, 1996). Of these the advantage most consistently identified is the reduction of costs and overheads (Murray, 1995). BC Drinks’s move to home-based working was no exception. It was, from the outset, driven by the pursuit of competitive advantage through cost reduction achieved primarily by the removal of the overheads of expensive office accommodation. Despite the trend for remote working to appear predominantly “employer led’, it does appear to be less one sided in the benefits it can offer both parties to the employment relationship than most other forms of flexibility. It potentially provides positive outcomes for individuals, whether these are incidental or strategically driven by a concern for arrangements that offer a form of “mutual flexibility” for employer and employee (Reilly, 2001). As a result, remote working or teleworking has gained an image of a “liberating form of employment” (Moon and Stanworth, 1997) through working in a home environment free from the stress of daily commuting, with greater autonomy to organise the working day and the opportunity to work undisturbed by office politics and distractions. These are features of a working environment likely to be attractive to many individuals and most reported experiences have centred on teleworking’s potential benefits for both employer and employee but a number of studies have provided a more cautious perspective. At the earliest stages of teleworking’s development, Metzger and Von Glinow (1988) identified some of the difficulties that can arise when work is relocated into the home environment which concur with a number of the problems identified in this study; for example, the demands of parenting, social isolation, reduced organisational loyalty and issues of monitoring. Baruch and Nicholson (1997) argue for attention to be paid in assessing the suitability of teleworking to the fit between the nature of the job, the technology, family circumstances, the organisational culture and individual attitudes and qualities. Their view is that a fit between all these factors is a prerequisite for effective home working. The likelihood of all these factors being satisfied would suggest that reaching a perfect balance between employer and employee inclination will not be a frequent occurrence and employer-led initiatives due to cost rationalisation are likely to remain a major influence in the adoption of teleworking.

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Figure 1. Destabilising the trust relationship – the employee perspective

Trust in the employment relationship The importance of the “implicit” psychological contract which reflects the understandings between employer and employee about their respective contributions to the employment relationship is well recognised in the academic literature (Fox, 1974; Schein, 1978; Watson, 1987). Widespread organisational change, challenging the perceptions and beliefs employees have about mutual obligations in the employment relationship, has led to increasing interest in the notion of the “psychological contract” as something as significant as the written employment contract (Herriot et al., 1998; Rousseau, 1996). Watson (1987, p. 141) observes that the “implicit contract is never fixed, nor is it ever stable and two particular factors tend to threaten its stability – the push towards increased efficiency on the part of the employer and the tendency towards collective action and challenge on the part of the employee”. As the study revealed, the employer’s pursuit of efficiency through cost cutting led to the sales team feeling that it had been at their expense by destabilising important elements of their implicit contract. Their observation was that home-based working had resulted in reduced support for them in their daily work eroding the level of trust hitherto placed in their employer’s actions. This perceived “trust violation” resulted in the loss of equilibrium and a subsequent renegotiation and recalibration of the employment relationship as depicted by Figure 1. It suggests three main outcomes in such circumstances depending on the quality and acceptability of an employer’s response; either a full restoration of trust, a recalibration of the relationship on changed terms or a decision to discontinue the relationship altogether (Lewicki and Bunker, 1996). This last outcome was evident at BC Drinks in the trebling of labour turnover during the first year of the scheme’s operation. The extent to which employees identify a perceived breach in the fulfilment of an employer’s obligations is likely to be heavily influenced by their perceptions of managerial behaviours and trustworthiness in handling the change process (Harris and McGrady, 1999). The behaviours identified by Whitener et al. (1998) as particular influences on employee’s perceptions of managerial trustworthiness are consistency, integrity, the sharing and delegation of control, communications and the demonstration of concern.

The sales team’s home-based working experience At BC Drinks Ltd, the two surveys suggested that the sales force found their employer to be deficient not only in the quality and extent of communications, but also in the actual demonstration of concern for employees attempting to redefine the temporal and spatial boundaries between work and home life. The situation, described by one individual as “like it, lump it or leave”, was one of perceived abandonment by management. The interviews and focus groups revealed that individuals experiencing particular problems physically accommodating a “home office” felt their managers had a responsibility to make themselves aware of individual circumstances (Kramer and Tyler, 1996) prior to implementation. Despite briefing sessions prior to the implementation of home-based working, to the sales team the working last day at the regional office appeared to have arrived without sufficient preparation. One recalled it as being “rather like the last day at school, we were handed a satchel with an information pack and then packed off home to get on with it”. The extent to which the sales team felt deserted by a company many of them had given considerable service to was not really apparent to their managers until the first survey responses six months later. A situation that was then exacerbated by a management ill prepared for and insufficiently responsive to employees’ reported problems. The perceived continuing managerial failure then to address their concerns adequately had a further detrimental effect on levels of trust. In reality, many of the problems identified by the initial questionnaire were particularly difficult for managers to resolve without significant expenditure or were related to family circumstances viewed as “outside the accepted responsibilities” of an employer. For respondents who described themselves as either “just forgotten” or at best “left to muddle through” the subsequent lack of any timely and tangible company action was construed as further evidence of a lack of “employer concern”. Within the year, labour turnover among the sales team had increased from a previous annual average of 6 per cent to nearly 20 per cent. To the management’s consternation, those leaving were frequently the most experienced and high performing staff. In common with other home-based working studies, employees reported working as hard or even harder than before teleworking began but were unconvinced that their productivity had similarly increased when related to the actual hours worked. Although 56 per cent of the sales force said they spent the same amount of time with customers, 30 per cent said they spent less time largely due to increased administrative tasks. A total of 76 per cent reported spending more time in the “home office” than they had in the previous “work office”. The explanations provided were that “paperwork” took more time and there were more distractions and interruptions (Felstead and Jewson, 2000). In terms of overall effectiveness, 36 per cent described this as the same as before but 44 per cent felt that, to varying degrees, they were generally working

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more effectively than before. The remaining 20 per cent felt their performance had actually been impaired by home working. The majority of the team (85 per cent) reported working a longer working day although less than half felt this contributed to improved performance. A widely expressed view was that the absence of administrative support had increased workloads but was not properly recognised by the company. Working weekends “to catch up” was a regular practice for 60 per cent of the team. Perhaps the most concerning finding was that over one-third felt home-based working had increased rather than reduced their stress levels. As anticipated by the company, just over half the sales team reported initial feelings of isolation, problems adjusting to the technology and the disadvantages of reduced social contact with their co-workers and line managers. Although the evidence suggested that such factors presented differing degrees of individual difficulty, the dominant concern was the suitability of “home as a substitute for the office”. The ability to work without interruption or distraction was highly dependent on the physical attributes of the home and the presence of young family. Personal circumstances influenced the degree of acceptance and adjustment. For example, while one single parent was delighted with the greater flexibility, another employee, whose husband also worked from home, found the problems of dual home working so overwhelming that she left due to a stress-related illness. The four issues most frequently identified by respondents are now considered in turn.

The interface between work and home life For two-thirds of respondents a major tension lay in establishing the interface between work time and family time. Campbell Clark (2000) argues that homebased working reverses arrangements that have prevailed since the Industrial Revolution for work and home to develop as distinct domains with different rules, thought patterns and behaviours. Members of the sales team experienced varying degrees of difficulty in coping with the blurring of these domains as a direct result of returning the production processes of work back into the home. This was less of an issue for those in the team with family members out at work all day or, in three instances, living alone. The variables that made certain individuals better able to cope than others with the merging of these two domains are complex and require further and deeper investigation than can be provided by this study. There were contextual factors shared by those that found the integration the most difficult, such as the presence of very young children, a non-working partner or spouse or both partners working from home, but less commonality in those that experienced an easier adaptation. One-third of respondents actually saw work as becoming more rather than less intrusive in their personal lives as illustrated by the following comments:

It works well if you could have time to build into the day to relax away from work. It is becoming a strain that I feel I am always at work – my wife says we can’t get away from it. More space would help.

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I found it much easier before and so did my family. They knew when I was home that my time was for them and that I had switched off, now it is confusing. It is difficult not to get distracted when I am working at home by other jobs that need doing just to keep things ticking over. My working day has extended from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.

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The intrusion of work into family activities was reported as a source of conflict with partners in several instances. Only half of respondents had the space at home to be designated solely for office work, 30 per cent worked off the kitchen table which meant clearing away work in progress for meal times. In the absence of a study, a dining room/area was the next most likely place for work creating problems of occupying valuable living space shared by other family members. These experiences are consistent with Baruch and Nicholson’s (1997) findings that teleworkers may well suffer from less work-related but more family-related stress. For some trying to “juggle” home and domestic responsibilities led to feelings of acting unprofessionally, as observed by one member of the team new to parenthood: I wouldn’t recommend this way of working to anyone with a baby in the house. It just doesn’t feel very professional trying to calm the baby and take a phone call. It sounds selfish but if I wasn’t physically here it would be so much easier to concentrate on doing a proper job.

In contrast, for a few individuals the new way of working offered real benefits but paradoxically these were attributed, as Baruch (2000) similarly identified, to either an absence of family commitments or an opportunity to organise these commitments more easily to reduce work/family conflicts, for example: As a single parent, most of the problems I had previously in organising the working week have disappeared. I think my self organising skills were fairly well developed before the scheme started and this stood me in good stead. I really enjoy the benefits provided by working from home – this is probably due to my partner working full time and having grown up children. I think if I had done this when they were younger it would have been difficult to work so effectively.

What is worth noting in these illustrations of contrasting circumstances but a shared positive view of teleworking is that where difficulties associated with the presence of family were identified, these came from male breadwinners coping with child caring taking place around them rather than the single parent well acquainted with arranging time to accommodate the demands of family and work. While individuals adopted different coping strategies, there was a common view that “management” should have shown more understanding and support to those struggling to balance the demands of work and family made more immediate by their increased presence in the home.

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With two small children in the house the only current practical solution is to get up early in the morning or work late into the night but I still risk waking them up and its not when I am at my best.

Four employees had made concerted efforts to make a visible demarcation between work and home through defined times of being available to family or “at work”. Different coping strategies were illustrated by the variation in attitudes to work-related telephone calls. A total of 56 per cent allowed customers to contact them 24 hours a day and at weekends, but 44 per cent had placed limits on such contact by not giving out home telephone numbers and switching their mobile or business telephones off at the weekend and late evening. A total of 70 per cent missed the filter provided by administrators in the office and said the telephone was the major intrusion into family life and a cause of arguments. The new rules of when it was acceptable to say “I am not at work” were unclear to both the teleworkers and their managers. The working day now appeared boundaryless whereas it had previously been defined by either being in the office or working away from home. Rather than expressing anxieties about excessive monitoring, one-third of the respondents wanted a closer interest in their hours as they felt their “invisibility” had led managers to be unaware of the actual time they spent on company business. They identified a need to formalise what constituted an acceptable working day and to legitimise non-work times even though that might erode the degree of personal autonomy claimed as one of the benefits of homeworking. A lack of clarity about the legal contract in the new timeless work domain endorses Baruch and Smith’s (2002) recommendation for proper consideration of the potential legal implications of not defining the working day for home-based staff. Singled out for attention is the difficulty of monitoring hours to comply with working time regulation and the adverse effect working long hours may have on occupationally-related stress, which is more likely go undetected among a distanced workforce. Two-way commitment A total of 80 per cent of the sales team felt that their level of commitment to the organisation had diminished yet high commitment theory (Gallie et al., 2001) suggests that greater opportunities to organise home and work time should enhance organisational commitment. The lack of an alternative working arrangement and a perception that employees had borne both the cost and

inconvenience of home working had the reverse effect and deepened as the year progressed. It led one long serving employee to comment:

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The company has had all the gain in this situation whereas we have had all the pain. I have calculated that this new way of working has cost me an extra £170 a month when I take into account the extra heating, lighting and other expenditure.

The potential for the erosion of trust in such workplace transitions (Herriot et al., 1998) was typically illustrated by the following observations: I had really no objection to working from home, in fact I quite like it but I do object to the financial benefits just going to the company. They couldn’t have done it without us and I think they should have helped us far more. It’s been one way traffic and you can see which way! It is very difficult to work effectively in a confined space and it has affected my productivity, I also think it places a strain on relationships and several of us are finding this is the case. The company appears to think that all the commitment should come from us but they should have shown more commitment to us.

In policy terms, the employer’s lack of action suggested uncertainty over how to respond. Where difficulties could only be resolved by major expenditure, it conflicted with the initial cost saving rationale for the initiative. By the end of the year it had been agreed that each home-based employee should have a £500 allowance for office furniture and other essential equipment but this was perceived to be just “too little and too late”. In employee relations terms, the company’s slow response heightened employees’ perceptions that their employer had neglected a fundamental duty of care implicit in the psychological contract (Morrison and Robinson, 1997). Conflicts between work and family time were viewed by the line managers as an area where they would be wiser not to get involved, creating an impression of not caring for the individual left to resolve such tensions alone. Communications and isolation Asked about meetings with their co-workers, only 15 per cent reported now having regular social contact time. Social contact had decreased significantly since the loss of opportunities to meet at the office even though 90 per cent felt socialisation time was actually far more important than ever. A total of 63 per cent reported feeling isolated since they had started working from home but also said they were less likely to fix up social events due to work and family commitments. The lack of “face-to-face” interaction was seen as reducing the speed of problem solving and opportunities to find out what was going on. As one of the team observed this could waste valuable time as “we may be reinventing the wheel when in the past five minutes chat at the beginning of the day would have suggested a solution just by sharing our experiences”. Contact with line managers had reduced to three or four meetings every quarter and the circulated communication brief was held to be not relevant or

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insufficient to bridge the communications gap. Team meetings when they occurred were described as “formal” with time constraints because of a full agenda which further reduced opportunities for informal discussion. Several respondents reported feeling “invisible to the company” and offered this as an explanation for the tardiness of an employer response to their difficulties. It was suggested that “out of sight really did mean out of mind” when it came to home-based working (Pieperl and Baruch, 1997) which added to the majority’s view that the relationship with their employer had been adversely affected. Discussion – the managerial challenge The study’s findings illustrate the challenges of teleworking for both employers and employees in establishing fresh boundaries between work time, non-work time and legitimate availability. They support Baruch’s (2000) view that home working is characterised by better conditions and high trust management is only a partial truth. In common with other workplace transitions, BC Drinks’s move to home-based working placed the organisation’s ability to meet the expectations of its employees in changed circumstances under close scrutiny. Past and unspoken sets of expectations dominated attempts to renegotiate and recalibrate the employment relationship within a new paradigm of “home-work” relations. The challenge for the managers at BC Drinks Ltd was how to maintain employee commitment at the same time as implementing major changes which appeared to the sales force to have had a disproportionately disruptive effect on their lives. The company’s perceived failure to resource adequately the new working arrangements were construed as a breach of a fundamental duty of an employer to provide employees with sufficient support to effectively undertake their work roles (Mishra, 1996). The sales force’s sense of being discarded was reinforced by the observed lack of perceived mutuality in a working arrangement where the employees had borne the costs while the company had increased its profits. Attention to ensuring a balance in the benefits for both employer and employer would appear to be an obvious prerequisite for gaining commitment to home-based working (Reilly, 2001) rather than relying on the image of teleworking as a universally more liberating and rewarding way of working. Yet at BC Drinks Ltd little consideration had been given, if any, to the impact of home-based working on the nature of the employment relationship or the presence of the four factors Baruch and Nicholson (1997) suggest need to be simultaneously present for effective teleworking. The liberation in this instance was predominantly the employer’s release from costly overheads, an outcome not lost on a group of employees reporting longer working hours and varying degrees of disruption to family life. This observed inequity of outcomes encouraged a view that levels of trust had been significantly eroded in a form of temporal flexibility where perceived mutual gain is an important aspect of making it a success (Kurland and Egan, 1999).

The employer’s expectation that the greatest challenge for the sales workforce would be the self management of their working time proved, in practice, to be less of a factor than accommodating work into their domestic environment. With the majority being men with young dependants their concerns were instead dominated by very different kinds of adjustment such as the demarcation of work and family time, the lack of space (both physical and temporal) to work undisturbed and a resultant extension to the working day (CIPD, 2001). The transition to a “home-based office” not only resulted in a renegotiation of an individual’s work/home time frame, but also raised as many issues stemming from the actual spatial relocation of work activities. Both dimensions need to be addressed in the search for relevant approaches to the employment relationship with a distanced, less visible workforce. The issues raised by employees challenge existing perspectives on the relationships between time, space and actual physical presence (Lash and Urry, 1994, p. 232) which present particular challenges for managers accustomed to employment relationships with a more visible workforce. At BC Drinks Ltd, these proved to be “uncharted waters” for a supervisory management unclear about the contours of their responsibilities when work became embedded in the individual employee’s home. There was a continuing uncertainty about the socially acceptable boundaries of demonstrating concern for individuals which impeded timely responses and the search for solutions to the identified problems. It was reinforced by a senior management heavily influenced by a traditional notion of the inadvisability of getting involved in employees’ personal lives (Kossek et al., 1994) in case this was interpreted as an invasion of privacy. The paradox is that by the very act of relocating work into the home, an employer has already committed a major intrusion into the individual’s domestic life and, it is argued, have a responsibility to give proper support to employees in resolving the resultant issues. The study revealed a widespread expectation that a “good employer” would demonstrate such concern and it can come as a shock to employees to learn that employers offering flexible working are not necessarily interested in the wider family’s well-being which then erodes employee trust (Flynn, 1995). In such circumstances, a recalibration of the employment relationship may arguably lead to a less relational and more transactional relationship with lowered employee expectations and emotional commitment but greater realism about reciprocity and increased individual freedom (Robinson et al., 1994). Moves to home-based teleworking need to be informed from the outset by an awareness and understanding of individual circumstances outside the work domain. In the case study organisation, an audit of the sales team and an initial pilot study would have suggested that the initiative be approached with a consideration of alternative, albeit interim, arrangements for employees whose personal circumstances were likely to be detrimental to effective home working. An ongoing challenge for employers lies in identifying those

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employees likely to be particularly suited to home working. While this study provides some insights into circumstances unlikely to be conducive to effective home-based teleworking, the circumstances and characteristics of employees where it will be more easily accommodated remain elusive and highly individual. As Tietze et al. (2003) observe in a study of teleworkers’ coping strategies, each teleworker and their families have to find their own solutions. Campbell Clark (2000) suggests the line manager has a particularly vital role to play in negotiating the interface between the domains of work and home. She describes them as “border keepers” who define the boundaries of work in contrast to “spouses” who define the boundaries of home. This implies that the sensitivity of supervisors/managers to family circumstances becomes far more critical in home-based working situations and that they have specific development needs to prepare them to assist employees in balancing the demands of home and work (Galinsky and Stein, 1990). Employers have the same “duty of care” to home-based employees as other more visible employees (Fidderman, 2002). Whereas these can be reasonably mechanistic when it comes to the reduction and elimination of physical hazards, it becomes far less straightforward when assessing the less visible health and safety risks of increasing hours of work and stressful working conditions for teleworking staff. Moon and Stanworth (1997, p. 35) argue for a charter for teleworkers to ensure that that their terms and conditions of employment are not compromised by working at home and with reduced supervision. Their view is that this is needed because the “prevailing archetype in the literature of the highly paid consultant” exercising personal freedoms in home-based working is not the reality for many as illustrated by the employee experience at BC Drinks. An emergent message for employers with teleworking staff and, in particular, for HR practitioners is the need to develop and promote HR policies on selection, appraisal, development and reward which can take account of the differing needs and realities of the home-based worker. An EU agreement on telework was signed in July 2002 presenting something of a new departure in the development of EU law as it is to be implemented at national level on a voluntary basis. It remains to be seen how this will be taken forward in the UK, but organisations employing teleworkers or considering doing so would be well advised to consider its provisions which include working conditions, equal treatment compared with comparable office-based workers, data protection, the provision of and maintenance of work equipment, health and safety protection and proper training. As already acknowledged, evidence from one case study offers only limited insights into the issues to be addressed in moves to home-based teleworking, but its findings reinforce the need to develop our understandings of the complex interactions between work and family life (Vannoy and Dubeck, 1998). Taking work into the home environment challenges and changes the

responsibilities of employers accustomed to a traditional employment relationship shaped by paying for work time that is distinguishable from non-work time and is physically removed from the immediate demands of home.

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Footnote While this study identified a number of the problems faced by a group of employees in adjusting to a compulsory home working policy, two years later many of the sales force involved in the initial project are still home-based teleworkers. They continue to report drawbacks but none of them would now wish to return to office-based working.

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Galinsky, E. and Stein, P.J. (1990), “The impact of human resource policies on employees: balancing work /family life”, Journal of Family Issues, Vol. 8, pp. 368-83. Gallie, D., Felstead, A. and Green, F. (2001), “Employer policies and organisational commitment in Britain 1992-7”, Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 37 No. 6, pp. 1081-101. Harris, L. and McGrady, A. (1999), “Local government reorganisation – rules, responsibilities and renegotiating relationships”, Journal of Strategic Change, Vol. 8 No. 5, pp. 287-97. Herriot, P., Hirsh, W. and Reilly, P. (1998), Trust and Transition: Managing the Future Employment Relationship, Wiley, Chichester. Hotopp, U. (2002), “Teleworking in the UK”, Labour Market Trends, Vol. 110 No. 6, pp. 311-8. Huws, H., Jagger, N. and Bates, P. (2001), Where the Butterfly Alights, The Global Location of E-work, IES Report 378, Institute of Employment Studies, London. Huws, U. (1996), Teleworking and Rural Development, Rural Development Commission, Salisbury. Income Data Services (IDS) (1996), Teleworking, Study 616, IDS, London. Kossek, E.E., Dass, P. and Demarr, B. (1994), “The dominant logic of employer-sponsored work and family initiatives: human resource managers’ institutional role”, Human Relations, Vol. 47, pp. 1121-49. Kramer, R. and Tyler, T. (1996), Trust in Organisations. Frontiers of Theory and Research, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Kurland, N.B. and Egan, T.D. (1999), “Telework: the advantages and challenges of working here, there, anywhere and anytime”, Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 28 No. 2, pp. 53-68. Jackson, P. and van der Wielen, J. (1998), Teleworking: International Perspectives, Routledge, London. Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1994), Economies of Signs and Space, Sage, London. Lewicki, R. and Bunker, B. (1996), “Developing and maintaining trust in work relationships”, in Kramer, R. and Tyler, T. (Eds), Trust in Organisations. Frontiers of Theory and Research, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 246-60. Mishra, A.K. (1996), “Organizational responses to crisis – the centrality of trust”, in Kramer, R. and Tyler, T. (Eds), Trust in Organisations. Frontiers of Theory and Research, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 261-87. Metzger, R.O. and Von Glinow, M.A. (1988), “Off-site workers: at home and abroad”, California Management Review, Vol. 30 No. 2, pp. 10-16. Moon, C. and Stanworth, C. (1997), “Ethical issues of teleworking”, A European Review, Vol. 6 No. 1, pp. 35-45. Morrison, E. and Robinson, S. (1997), “When employees feel betrayed: a model of how psychological contract violation develops”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 22 No. 1, pp. 226-56. Murray, B. (1995), “The economic arguments for teleworking”, Flexible Working, November, pp. 31-3. Pieperl, M.A. and Baruch, Y. (1997), “Back to square zero: the post-corporate career”, Organisational Dynamics, Vol. 25 No. 4, pp. 7-22. Reilly, P. (2001), Flexibility at Work – Balancing the Interests of Employer and Employee, Gower, Aldershot. Robinson, S.L., Kraatz, M.S. and Rousseau, D.M. (1994), “Changing obligations and the psychological contract: a longitudinal study”, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 37 No. 1, pp. 137-52.

Rousseau, D.M. (1996), Psychological Contracts in Organisations: Understanding Written and Unwritten Agreements, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Schein, E. (1978), Career Dynamics, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. Tietze, S., Harris, L. and Musson, G. (2003), “When work comes home: coping strategies of teleworkers and their families”, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 13 No. 4, pp. 385-97. Vannoy, D.; Dubeck, P. (Eds) (1998), Challenges for Work and Family in the 21st Century, Aldine de Gruyter, New York, NY. Watson, T. (1987), Sociology, Work and Industry, 2nd ed., Routledge, London. Whitener, E., Brodt, S., Korsgaard, M. and Werner, J. (1998), “Managers as initiators of trust: and exchange relationship for understanding managerial trustworthy behavior”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 23 No. 3, pp. 513-30.

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The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0048-3486.htm

The times and temporalities of home-based telework Susanne Tietze Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK, and

Gill Musson Management School, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK Keywords Homeworking, Teleworking, Time, Time management, Boundaries Abstract Drawing on an empirical investigation situated in 25 households of professional managers, who worked regularly at home, this article explores how internalised time discipline is evoked, appropriated and challenged through and in home-based telework. The notion of clock-time is opposed with the notion of task-time and it is shown how both temporalities inform the organisation of paid and unpaid work. It is shown that in some households the simultaneous co-presence of conceptually different temporalities led to an increasing bureaucratisation of time as boundaries between “work” and “the household” had to be maintained and protected. In other households such co-presence resulted in the emergence of more task-based approaches to the co-ordination of all activity and more elastic temporal boundaries drawn around them.

Personnel Review Vol. 32 No. 4, 2003 pp. 438-455 q MCB UP Limited 0048-3486 DOI 10.1108/00483480310477524

Introduction Propelled by advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs), changing expectations regarding the location, time and agency of paid work together with changing managerial strategies, the temporal and spatial regimes of industrial production have become subject to renegotiations and change. Paid work has become “flexible” and is no longer exclusively associated with particular geographical settings. Rather, it has become an activity to pursue anywhere and at any time, including the culturally different sphere of home. We report here on a research study which explored what happens when the temporal rationalities of paid work meet with the times and temporalities of the home environment through the practice of home-based telework. Thus, we explored temporal flexibility as lived experience from the point of view of 25 management professionals, who worked regularly at home while remaining full-time employees of their respective organisations. In particular our research focused on the exploration of how temporal boundaries as associated with different cultural contexts were employed and renegotiated. The structure of the paper is as follows. First, we describe the organisation of industrial production as based on one central temporal metaphor, namely “time is money”. We compare and contrast this metaphor with the temporal images on which household production is constructed and explore to what extent professional people can be viewed as autonomously organising and using their time. Following on, we discuss the research design and our epistemological stance, and report on how we operationalised our research

themes. We then present some findings on management professionals evoking Temporalities of and enacting particular temporal boundaries when working at home. In the home-based discussion we address the issue of the professional as increasingly autonomous telework in managing time and/or as being gradually more bureaucratised vis-a`-vis home-based telework.

439 Time and work Time is the key ordering device in the organisation of all human activity, including that of paid work (Adam, 1990, 1995; Hassard, 1989; Zerubavel, 1981, 1987). For example, Adam (1990) in her study on time and social theory shows how the time of work (the duration of the working period), the timing of work (the arrangement of working time) and the tempo of work (the utilisation of work time) constitute the fundamental temporal structure that define the experience of work. In industrialised societies, the synchronisation of individual activities into the overall production process enabled economic development. Bringing industrial activity into a uniform temporal stepping order proved essential for the successful development of industrial capitalism, which was based on the operationalisation of clock time in the production process. Indeed, it has been argued (e.g. Mumford, 1934) that the “clock” was the key machine of the industrial age. In a similar vein Hassard (1989, p. 18, emphasis in original) observes: “During industrialism the clock was the instrument of co-ordination and control. The time period replaced the task as the focal unit of production”. Clock-time is context-free time, homogeneous and standardised, and can be measured, divided and controlled. However, the control exercised by externalised clock-time was crucially complemented by a simultaneous internalised conformity. Thompson (1967, p. 61) writes about the measurement of time: “This measurement embodies a simple relationship. Those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer’s time and their ‘own’ time. And the employer must use the time of his labour, and see it is not wasted: not the task, but the value of time when reduced to money is dominant. Time is now a currency: it is not passed, but spent”. Thus Thompson (1967, p. 95) argues, the understanding of industrial time is based on time-keeping, time-thrift and time-discipline and that as such “men’s mind became saturated with the metaphoric equation time is money’”. The importance of time-keeping and time-thrift was also taken up in schools and reinforced by particular religious beliefs as promulgated by the church. The Protestant work ethic – an ethic that saw a causal connection between work and a state of grace/salvation – became the intellectual foundation of industrialism and capitalism (Anthony, 1977; Weber, 1958). Within this ethic, the utilitarian perception of time was prevalent, namely that time is not recoverable and therefore needs to be treated as a scarce resource, and optimised in utilisation. It follows that in order to achieve a state of grace, one needs to become a careful, prudent manager of one’s resources, temporal or

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otherwise. Thus, economic development and religious ideas informed each other and provided the moral/conceptual frameworks for the emergence of capitalist industries. Adam, like Thompson, sees such internalised time-discipline, based on the conceptualisation and operationalisation of clock-time, as “fundamentally implicated in the historical development towards commodified time” (Adam, 1990, p. 112) of which Taylorism serves as a prime illustration. It expresses the monetary attitude to time as something that needs to be controlled and spent in the spirit of scientific, objective precision and by dint of the extrapolation of this logic to moral rule: it must not be wasted, squandered or given away freely. “Time is money” is the underlying principle that informs, shapes and expresses the practices and (work) patterns of social and organisational life. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980, p. 8) the “time is money” metaphor structures everyday activities in a very profound way, in that time is (almost) exclusively conceived as a quantifiable commodity, which can be “spent, wasted, budgeted, invested wisely or poorly, saved or squandered” (for an extended discussion of the commodified conceptualisation of time see Adam (1990, 1995, 1998); Laermann (1992); and Zerubavel (1981)). The sheer ubiquity of the culturally dominant time is money nexus might detract from other conceptions of time. As Lakoff and Johnson point out, this particular equation of time and money is, historically speaking, new, having been preceded by a task-based conceptualisation of time, which is variable and context-dependent (see also Hassard, 1989). The notion of the German Tagwerk (day’s work) used to be such a measure (Adam, 1990; Sennett, 1998). In this conceptualisation of time, work (not money) is the measure of time. So that the nature of a specific task drives the rhythms and completion of the work, rather than the unforgiving beat of the clock. Additionally, such tasks are seen as context-bound in that their fulfilment is variable, because the contexts into which they are embedded might change. Hence such a conceptualisation of time resists exact measurement, objective precision and exhaustive standardisation. The notion of the Tagwerk is informed by a more dynamic understanding of time. Temporal boundaries are seen not so much as rigid lines, but as pulsing, fluctuating bands of give and take. This conception of time has been associated with either pre-industrial modes of production or indeed with the household as the culturally different sphere to industrial production. While we do not claim that contemporary households are exempt from the beat of institutionalised clock-time and its manifestations in schedules, calendars, appointments and deadlines, the household nevertheless is grounded in different, more malleable temporalities (Daly, 1996; Davies, 1990; Morgan, 1996), which constitute and reflect recurring patterns and rhythms of activities. As Adam (1995, p. 95) puts it: “times for caring, loving and educating, of household management and maintenance, and their female times of menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth and lactation are not so much

time measured, spent, allocated and controlled, as time lived, time made and Temporalities of time generated”. Thus the household is defined by more fluid, cyclic temporal home-based boundaries, while it is simultaneously subject to the commodified temporalities telework of its wider institutional context. In a rich theoretical account Sirianni (1991) depicts genuine opportunities (individual autonomy; democratic participation; equitable opportunities in the 441 labour market) to rethink the organisation of time inherent in the unfreezing of temporal boundaries currently experienced by the post-industrial societies of the West. She also contemplates the negative potential of such changes to social/organisational cohesion such as new forms of vulnerability, marginality and control. In this article we explore the opportunities and challenges inherent in one such change (telework), which transports the times and temporalities of paid work into the sphere of “home”. Such relocation unfreezes some rigid temporal boundaries and necessitates some re-negotiation of the teleworkers’ commitments to work and/or the domestic sphere. Telework Telework literally means working “at a distance”, suggesting the dislodging of people and processes from traditional spaces and times (Giddens, 1990), so that space and time become “distant” from each other (Lash and Urry, 1994). In other words, the traditional spaces of paid work (the office, the factory) and the times associated with these (nine to five hours; five days a week) become disjointed, so that paid work activity can be conducted, “anywhere”, “anytime”. Telework policies and practices incorporate and express such time-space distanciation. These include a number of alternative work forms such as satellite centres, neighbourhood work centres, mobile work as well as home-based telework (Jackson, 1999; Kurland and Bailyn, 1999), each of which is associated with a range of specific as well as shared advantages or challenges. Home-based telework is reported to deliver increased productivity, reduce estate costs and to increase employee morale, while for the individual it is reported to provide benefits of increased autonomy in balancing “work” and “life” as well as cutting out annoying commuting journeys. Organisational challenges associated with telework refer to issues of managing the remote workforce; issues of trust and commitment as well as the disruption of informal knowledge flows. For the individual associated drawbacks are often named as feelings of loneliness; lack of career opportunities; and loss of status (see Reilly (2001) for a comprehensive discussion of work flexibility). Intermingled with the chorus of protagonists and analysts of flexible policies and practices (Apgar, 1999; Davenport and Pearlson, 1998; Dex and Scheibl, 2001; Papalexandris and Kramar, 1999) one finds more sceptical voices, warning of the colonisation of all spheres of life by the logic and practices of commerce and industry. Hochschild (1997) for example, warns of the sneaking Taylorisation of family life, i.e. the ever-extending application of the tools and techniques of

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the “time is money” metaphor to all walks of life, so that the private sphere becomes increasingly dominated by the logos of industrial production (see also Adam, 1990; Kompast and Wagner, 1998; Sabelis, 2001). Similarly, Grey (1999) cautions against the over-zealous use of the vocabulary of management and managing to public and private lives, because notions and practices of control and dominance usually accompany such vocabulary. Also, telework has been associated with decreased individual autonomy and increase in surveillance (Fairweather, 1999; Sennett, 1998) as well as the exploitation of teleworkers, particularly women (Hadden and Silverstone, 1993). Work of researchers such as Jackson and van der Wielen (1998) and Felstead and Jewson (1996, 1999, 2000) on home-based (tele)work goes some way to provide some comprehensive, detailed analysis of the trends, issues, themes and diverse realities of home-based work as faced by different occupational groups. Felstead et al. (2001, p. 215) in their analysis of the UK Labour Force Survey state that “those who work at home do not comprise a homogenous group . . . in particular [there are] differences between non-manual and manual workers, and those who work mainly, partially and sometimes at home”. However, there is some particular evidence that professional people who remain in salaried, full-time employment relationships with one organisation, work increasingly at home for some of their working week. According to the latest UK Labour Market Trends (2002) the growth of homeworking among employees has risen since 1997 to stand at 2.2 million people which equates to 7.4 per cent of the employed population in the UK. Also, twice as many managers as administrative staff are teleworking, albeit only occasionally. Thus, despite some gaps in current understanding regarding the exact temporal patterns of telework or the experience of telework from the point of view of different occupational groups, the statistical evidence seems to indicate that, in particular, professional and managerial staff are tending to opt more frequently for home-based telework. In transporting paid work activity from its traditional geographical space and temporal frames into the home, it can be said that the spatial/temporal map of the work organisation is increasingly evolving into the household. This is more than a mere physical relocation, but implies the meeting of two previously distinct meaning worlds. Professionals, time and home-based telework We include in the definition of professional the group of “management professionals”, because management has become increasingly professionalised as witnessed and expressed by the emergence and dissemination of particular “bodies of knowledge”, through the institutions of management learning (e.g. business schools) and the definition of standards for conduct and behaviour by professional bodies. One core assumption in the definition of “a professional” is that professionals are autonomous in managing their own conduct and tasks.

In particular, they are in charge of their time beyond the immediate control of Temporalities of external mechanisms or persons (Seron and Ferris, 1995; Zerubavel, 1981). home-based However, “autonomy” or “being in charge” are inherently relative, since telework professionals are autonomous or in charge only as compared with the relative lack of control experienced by, for example, a worker on an assembly line or an office clerk. Furthermore, it could be argued that professionals, through the 443 mechanisms of socialisation and education, are a good example of internalised time disciplines, because the lack of external control they enjoy is directly related to the exercise of internal control. The combination of (relative) autonomy, as far as the pursuit and completion of tasks are concerned, is associated with roles of great(er) social prestige and importance (Zerubavel, 1981). However, also attributed to such prestige and importance is a measure of professional commitment, that stipulates that a professional’s duty is to be ever-available to the calls and needs of their clients. In this vein, professional managers can be seen to be in charge of the well-being of their organisations and are expected to activate their professional duties, whenever they are needed. They must be constantly available to work for the good of the organisation “to pursue their careers single-mindedly and respond unhindered to organizational demands” (Sirianni and Walsh, 1991, p. 424). In sum, the function of internalised time-discipline together with social expectations regarding the character and status of professional work, results in low temporal boundaries so that professionals are said to be “always on the job” (Zerubavel, 1981, p. 148). Thus professionalism can be said to evoke a somewhat contradictory set of assumptions about time (Seron and Ferris, 1995) in that there is a high price to pay for low temporal boundaries: On the one hand professionals do enjoy some autonomy over the hours of their days, but they must also demonstrate “a willingness to devote surpluses of time above and beyond what is formally required as a sign of trustworthiness and commitment” (Sirianni and Walsh, 1991, p. 424). This is certainly the case for management professionals, who have to develop particular internalised emotional and cognitive dispositions as part of their professional socialisation (Watson and Harris, 1999). UK managers in particular are seen to demonstrate their dedication through long-hours and constant availability to the job (Pollard, 2002) – their very time scarcity symbolises and expresses status and power (Young, 1988). Despite many calls for a reduction in this (relatively unproductive) long hours culture (Kodz et al., 1998), and even though the relationship between long hours and high commitment has become subject to some debate, cultural pressures to demonstrate commitment through long hours continue. As early as 1981, Zerubavel (1981, p. 157) observed an increasing bureaucratisation of professional commitment, which he sees clearly manifested in the “rigidification of their [professional] temporal boundaries”. The adherence to “office hours”, the refusal to work excessive “overtime” (as in junior doctors’ hours for example) could be considered as examples of such bureaucratisation.

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This bureaucratisation has continued in many professions (Cohen et al., 1999) although there is some debate about the extent to which professionals have succumbed to its pressure (Reed, 2000). One consequence though is that professionals no longer seem to define themselves exclusively through “being on the job all the time”, i.e. through their “ever-availability”. Rather, the time in which they are free from professional commitments, in and through their private time, is seen to play a greater role in their self-definition. It is only through the drawing of stronger temporal boundaries between the “job” and the “private” that such differentiation can be created and maintained. Thus, professional managers can be said to be in a temporal catch 22: internalised disciplines, together with the demands of high responsibility/high prestige work, result in low and fluid temporal boundaries (ever-availability). Whereas increasing bureaucratisation of professional commitment takes the form of more rigid temporal boundaries, resulting in the need to reconcile two images of the successful time manager. On the one hand they have to be frugal and careful in allocating time to tasks; being careful with time as a valuable, but rare commodity. On the other hand they have to be free-giving and generous with such temporal resources as required for the successful fulfilment of their professional role. Pulled in two different directions, the pressure is on the individual professional manager to make decisions vis-a`-vis such conflicting demands. It is often assumed, both conceptually and empirically, that the paid work of industry and the unpaid work of domesticity are clearly demarcated from each other (Morf, 1989; Nippert-Eng, 1996). This construction of “work” as being separate from “home” or “non-work” has always been far from clear (Brocklehurst, 2001; Hochschild, 1997; Perin, 1998; Seron and Ferris, 1995). Telework breaks most visibly with such notional and empirical separation. It has been argued that it reunites “work” and “home” and provides a golden opportunity to lead more balanced, holistic lives (Silver, 1993). Other research invariably points to the complexities of relocating “work” into “home” (for example, see Brocklehurst (2001) on issues of identity; Steward (2000) on temporal orders; Sullivan and Lewis (2001) on gender; Tietze and Musson (2002) on emotional management). Our contribution to the study of home-based telework is to explore how home-based professional managers cope with and enact their ambivalent temporal frames; frames which define their professional commitment and standing and which become through telework more frequently and regularly exposed to the different temporal rhythms of the household – the demands and requirements of yet another “greedy institution” (Coser, 1974). Research methodology Working from a social constructionist perspective (Burr, 1995; Johnson and Duberley, 2000) we took guidance from those approaches which had developed

a semiotic and sociological perspective on time (Adam, 1990; Nippert-Eng, Temporalities of 1996; Zerubavel, 1979, 1981, 1987, 1991), because through such a perspective, home-based the relations between the temporal, the social and the moral express themselves telework in material artefacts, observable behaviour and language. As such invisible assumptions (e.g. about temporal frames or boundaries) can become subject to the researchers’ gaze and inquiry. While we do not subscribe to a naI¨ve, 445 representationalist view of language, we see it as “capable of providing the means to communicate instructively in and on various realities” (Alvesson and Ka¨rreman, 2000, p. 151). In order to capture the domestic perspective, we, the authors, visited 25 teleworkers and their families. These teleworkers were diverse in industrial, sectoral or functional background, degrees of seniority and career development. They were all in a long-term employment relationship with one employer and had been working from home for some time. While some teleworked regularly (one and a half to three days a week), others did so more sporadically but for longer periods. All the teleworkers can be described as management professionals, who had a business/management education to degree level and who had established successful careers in the middle layers of their respective organisations. As such they were involved in high discretion work and self-directed in the pursuit and conduct of their activities. Their age spanned 33 to 48 years; 18 were married or cohabited; four were in long-term relationships; three were single. A total of 20 had children – two of the single teleworkers had children from previous relationships. Of those 18 cohabiting/married households, nine were traditional households with one breadwinner (only one female breadwinner); the other nine were by dual career households, with our main contact being defined by the family as the “breadwinner”. Despite this diversity, in terms of national background (see Hall (1960, 1976, 1979) and Manrai and Manrai (1995) for discussion of national culture and time), professional status, degree of self-directedness in the pursuit of work activity, age and attitude towards telework, our study group can be considered to be sufficiently homogeneous to allow for some collation of their accounts to shed light on the experience of telework time, although we would not wish to generalise our findings across to other occupational groups. In devising our research apparatus we had to find a way to operationalise the previously described themes and turn them into interview questions and into visible “units of analysis”. We decided to focus our attention on how temporal boundaries were drawn around “work” and “home”. Therefore, we asked questions about how our cohort structured their working days: when they began and ended their working days; when and which breaks they took; whether they shared meals with others in the household or ate alone; whether they allowed for interruptions; how they managed unplanned interruptions; who had access to them and when and so on and so forth. In exploring these issues in our home visits we began to develop an understanding of how

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temporal boundaries were enacted and (re)negotiated and whether they had become more fluid and open or more rigid and bureaucratised. Furthermore, in choosing home visits over other methods such as interviews conducted in the traditional office or self-report surveys, we were able to include observational data within our research methodology. In particular, we looked for clues on how spatial/temporal boundaries were drawn and expressed, for example as dress codes, or established around particular areas of the house, e.g. if a clearly demarcated work environment was discernible within the private sphere. We had negotiated a tour of the house during which we continued to have ad hoc conversations with our hosts and their families. To give an example: during one such tour, we were shown “the office”, a former spare room, which was clearly set up as a traditional work environment, with computer, fax, telephone, files and on the office door a sign said “Office – no entry during working hours”. This indicated to us an attempt at establishing a “work only” area, defined by spatial boundaries and temporal frames. However, this office was cluttered with toys, laundry basket and ironing board and photographs, flower arrangements and music CDs mingled with files and folders. During our conversations it emerged that the teleworker had tried to keep strict temporal and spatial boundaries, but was gradually invaded by the domestic spheres and its actors. When discussing these arrangements with the couple later, the spouse’s perspective was that “work had no right to occupy my spare room”. This, in turn, led to some discussion about the work-home relationship, the conflicts and patterns of their co-existence, and therefore gave us a richer data set. Not surprisingly, the nature of the home visits varied. The shortest one took only 45 minutes and comprised an interview with the teleworker (30 minutes); a quick tour of the house (five minutes) and a final sum-up, which included the spouse, over a cup of tea (ten minutes). In contrast the longest visit took almost four hours and comprised an interview (45 minutes) with the teleworker; a long (60 minutes) tour of the house, accompanied by the whole family (spouse, two children) and entailing extended visits in each room; a shared lunch – with occasional interruptions by children – some more general talk, interspersed and interrupted by family and work dynamics. These two extreme examples give a flavour of the interactions we had. Most visits took about two hours with flowing boundaries between interview and “talk”, observation and exchange of ideas. Every researcher has to make decisions about how to present his/her findings – in particular which ones to select and include in published work. In this regard, all articles are the crafted result of the authors’ choices. Here we have selected data that focus on temporal boundaries as played out in issues about accessibility, availability, scheduling and prioritising of tasks, and that simultaneously express dilemmas, issues or concerns succinctly and elegantly. We provide a context each time we use a quotation by stating who said what

and in which conversational context. Also, we indicate whether such Temporalities of quotations were typical for other teleworkers or whether they represent a more home-based idiosyncratic form of time management. telework Findings We present the findings in two parts. First, we show how clock-based and taskbased approaches to time inform the organisation of the (working) day. In the second section we discuss how teleworkers manage their availability and access when working at home. Clock-based and task-based approaches All teleworkers and co-residents had to integrate the presence of paid work into the household. Drawing temporal boundaries around activities was the major way of achieving such co-existence. The following quote is fairly typical of what teleworkers had to say in the context of deciding the beginning and end of their working days: The nine to five is gone. No one tells you to start and end your day. It’s your call. Everyone I know [who works at home] is quite disciplined. You have to be – there is no office, no boss, no colleagues to tell you what to do (Hannah, 35, HRM manager, teleworks regularly one and a half to two days a week).

In the absence of any external temporal, spatial or social default mechanisms, teleworkers draw on internalised discipline in order to organise their working period. Some, in particular those with children, pursue such organisation quite rigidly, in the spirit of highly compartmentalised working/non-working periods: I manage my time really strictly, possibly more strict than in the real [sic ] office. Here [at home] I have office hours and on the whole my family stick to them (Martin, 40, product manager, teleworks in irregular blocks).

Here, the time discipline is extended to provide an overall temporal structure to regulate access; the temporal lines drawn around work follow the logic of clocktime, which is applied to synchronise work and family time. Interesting, the beat of clock time is more strongly adhered to in the household itself than in the traditional office. When probing Martin on this, he explains: It is the only way I can contain work and not let it spill into the rest of our lives. [. . .] I can tell my children to leave me alone, it is much harder to tell that to a colleague.

Thus, strong temporal boundaries, while introducing a particular beat to the household, also protect the latter from any further intrusion beyond those measurable and therefore controllable hours. The activation of emotions is employed to maintain such boundaries – such activation is easier in the home, than in the more emotionally-controlled office environment. We found stronger temporal boundaries being drawn in particular during the morning until approximately middle afternoon. After about three o’clock,

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such boundaries became more porous. In particular, single teleworkers or those with young children at nursery or school, reported the following pattern:

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I tend to work mornings. They are my best time. After lunch the days often disintegrate a bit. I am still at the desk, but then there’s Jamie [son] to be picked up. I usually do some shopping on the way to the nursery. Later on when Pete [husband] comes home, he plays with Jamie and later on he cooks, so I can return to work and usually finish off by checking the e-mails. [. . .] but this is all slightly variable (Elizabeth, 37, accounts manager, teleworks two days a week).

Elizabeth describes a regular, clock-driven approach to the work in the first part of her day. After this period, the family duties take over and shape a less rigorously structured second half of the day. Still moving within the parameters of institutionalised clock time (e.g. nursery hours), the co-ordination of the day resembles, however, more a regularly recurring pattern, which changes depending on situational requirements. Work and domestic tasks meet and interact with each other as a more task-based approach to the organisation of the day emerges. Similar patterns occurred with the single teleworkers or households with no children, where parts of the working day are co-ordinated in the spirit of clock time, while other parts tend to be more fragmented and malleable, filled with leisure and socialising activities. As in Elizabeth’s example, so had other teleworkers developed a task-based approach to the temporal organisation of their lives. Eric gave a typical expression of such an approach: I am more relaxed about when and for how long I work. I tend to set myself tasks. The other day I really hit the ground running and started at about eight o’clock. I worked non-stop shortly before three o’clock. Finished. I had written the proposal. The rest of the day was mine (Eric, 44, engineer/project manager, teleworks in irregular blocks).

Clearly, clock-time for Eric acts only as an approximate point of reference; the time he spends “at work” is determined by the completion of the task, not by adhering to pre-given temporal frames. While such focused pure task-based approaches have not become the new norm among the teleworkers we visited, they nevertheless play an important part in breaking the normative influence of the long-hour ethos: I had to learn that working long hours is not the only way to be. It’s no point anyway, because no one can see you [implying colleagues, seniors]. So you might as well get on with the job (Suzie, 41, training and development manager, teleworks approximately two days a week).

For some teleworkers, domestic and work tasks began to mingle, so that some of the days came to resemble an assembly of “a shrapnel of tasks” or the day was described as being “in bits and pieces”, with tasks being “started, interrupted, semi-completed” (Fiona, 43, logistics manager, teleworks irregularly). However, if tasks mingled too much, this could lead to chaos for both work and domestic life. All our households avoided this potential for chaos by reverting back to clock-based temporal order when this was deemed necessary, thus maintaining a sense of stability and direction.

Availability and access Temporalities of Clock-based or task-based approaches to time are linked to the availability of home-based the teleworker for either the representatives of work (colleagues, secretaries, telework other managers, customers, collaborators) or for the representatives of the domestic sphere (family, spouses or partners, co-residents, neighbours, builders, gardeners, child minders). 449 All teleworkers without exception used ICT to stay in touch with their organisations and considered themselves available for their employer through this technology. Most also had a mobile phone, which they used in addition to land lines and e-mails, to stay in touch when leaving the house, e.g. to pick up children, when doing shopping or having a chat with the neighbours. The mobile phones offered some leeway to render their availability to their employers more flexible, and to manage social contacts. However, availability for the employer was associated with quite tight temporal boundaries and linked to a bureaucratised time frame; Eddie’s expression is typical: Of course I am at work and therefore available. But I really don’t expect any phone calls or urgent e-mails outside the normal office hours. I don’t mind so much when this happens while I am in the normal office, but my company is quite good at respecting that I also live at home (Eric, 38, marketing and sales manager, teleworks in irregular patterns).

On the whole availability to the employer when working at home was not considered problematic. However, availability for family members proved to be a contentious area. As our data in the previous section indicated, access was often regulated through the implementation of office hours, during which the teleworker was theoretically unavailable to the family. However, such temporal and spatial boundaries break the cultural expectations on which the household is grounded and therefore they are hard to maintain. The example we gave in the research methods section points to how such boundaries are undermined and challenged, because the physical presence of teleworkers in the household positions them in the rationales of both paid work and the rationale of the home. To manage physical presence with simultaneous notional absence requires the teleworkers to find solutions to this paradoxical situation. One family had developed a catchphrase which embodied a solution to this dilemma: Pretend I am not here! (Roger, 36, manager of technical design team, teleworks about one day per week).

Roger initially used it when he was working and did not want to become embroiled in some household affair. In turn, the family members took this phrase up whenever they wanted to avoid involvement in the family. Tom described another, albeit similar, avoidance strategy: When I’m working at home, I get up early, before Jane and the kids, so that I can have a business breakfast on my own and be at the desk by eight o’clock at the very latest. I avoid going down into the kitchen and lounge area when the kids are around. [Tea and coffee

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making facilities were part of the office.] When I have to go downstairs, I treat the children professionally, that means courteously, but briefly (Tom, 35, head of technical design, teleworks two days a week).

Thus, this avoidance strategy denies the family access to the father, who engages with his family within the parameters of his professional definition. The question of access and availability is for many teleworkers riddled with guilt: I always feel guilty when the children are around. It’s not that they come and disturb me. It’s more like I feel I should not be working. [. . .] Dawn [wife] is very good. She makes sure there are no disruptions (Tim; 42, facilities manager, teleworks one day a week).

This teleworking manager’s time at home is frequently accompanied by guilt; similarly typical is that other household members take on the management of the work/home interface by screening the access to the teleworker. Teleworkers with children reported frequent feelings of unease or confusion regarding their availability, for their children in particular. However, single teleworkers or those without children reported similar feelings of unease with regard to co-residents, neighbours or friends – although the intensity of such feelings and the depth of conflict over access seemed less pronounced. Clock-based approaches to time, then, were used to regulate access, although the different temporalities of the household interrupted them frequently and undermined the neat demarcation and rules. Thus, the clock continues to play an important role in regulating access. However, it was not the only temporal tool. We complete this section with an example of Richard and his mainly task-based approach to work: I work very irregularly. It all depends. I try to take our needs as a family into account. It’s all very task based, sometimes the task is large, sometimes not. Unless it is very urgent, I give Sarah and Peter [wife and son] priority. I don’t complain when Peter comes and wants to play with me. After all, this is why I volunteered to work at home. Sometimes we have to do a deal, so that “Daddy can finish the job, and then we can play.” We also have all our meals together (Richard, 40, international project co-ordinator, teleworks in regular blocks).

This degree of openness of access – expressed also in an open-plan lounge that hosted both work and living environment – is unusual. While we did find some teleworkers with children who had established some degree of flexible task-based approaches, few went as far as Richard. Furthermore, Richard’s comments also suggest a degree of reordering and re-prioritising of tasks that is unusual, in that family affairs are given priority over work affairs. In total we found only Richard and his family and one other teleworker who lived alone that had established such a task-based approach, prioritising the private sphere over the work sphere. Mainly, teleworkers and their families developed compromises, drew on clock time more often, but also found opportunities for a more task-based approach.

Discussion Temporalities of Home-based teleworkers need to rely on their self-discipline to devise a home-based temporal structure for their days spent at home. In the absence of any external telework default signals, they have to act as both control and executing authority of internalised time-disciplines at the same time. They are their own watchers and keepers. 451 The enactment of such disciplines draws strongly on the concept of clock time and its rigid temporal boundaries. These are introduced into the household to enable the uninterrupted pursuit of paid work. However, they also act as a protective measure for the family and the private sphere. This imported temporal order does not always sit comfortably with the rhythms of the household. The use of signs on office doors, dress codes, the employment of symbolic behaviour, avoidance strategies serve to safeguard “work” from the trespassing family. In this regard the sceptical voices of, for example, Hochschild (1997), Grey (1999) or Sennett (1998), appear to reflect some of our empirical findings. Other predictions however, such as increased surveillance by the employing organisation or increased loss of autonomy were not empirically apparent for this particular group of teleworkers. This then begs the question whether the so-called professional autonomy is merely masking the invisible strings of institutionalised, internalised clock time. Thus drawn, bureaucratised temporal boundaries are as all demarcations inherently precarious and unstable (Zerubavel, 1981, 1991). The household contests the boundaries and begins to impose its own particular temporal orders onto “work” – such struggles over boundaries can take the visible form of conflict over access. These are played out as immense efforts by teleworkers and household members to defend, maintain or renegotiate such boundaries and are often accompanied by emotions of guilt and irritation (Tietze and Musson, 2002). Such conflict did not feature often in access for and to the employing organisation. Rather these high temporal boundaries were continually queried, challenged and eroded by the family/household. In some households this led to an increasing bureaucratisation of time as boundaries were repaired and strengthened. In other households such conflict led to the emergence of more task-based approaches to the co-ordination of both work and domestic tasks, resulting in more elastic temporal boundaries. We can describe these decisions about accessibility as more contextualised, rather than pre-determined as in the clock-based approach, so that they became contingent on situational requirements as well as the parameters of the job in hand. Teleworkers following task-based approaches tended to be more flexible in the way they handled access, or in how they defined the end of the working day; some few exceptions even re-prioritising domestic over work tasks. The task-based approach seemed to afford individuals greater degrees of autonomy beyond the internalised discipline of self-direction, in that the decisions they made about their availability were contingent on several factors. But this

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autonomy also came at a price, because teleworkers experienced the continuous “weighing up” of choices as exhausting and occasionally frustrating. The long-hours culture associated with professional managers’ commitment and standing is made redundant through telework to some extent, because the absence of peers or seniors removes the immediate cultural pressure to “live” such values. However, our study group of teleworkers remained full-time employees who had regular contact with colleagues and customers, and therefore we cannot comment on whether they had moved beyond the demonstration of their “worthiness” through such normative behaviour. Most teleworkers and their households employed both clock and task-based modes, fluctuating between these different approaches to temporal ordering. The clock provided regularity and psychological safety; the task provided the focus and psychological benchmark. Within the flux and tensions of these two modes, professional commitment and commitment as private people met, and informed each other. Home-based work afforded these particular teleworkers to move a little, albeit precariously and inchoately, towards what Sirianni (1991, p. 249) calls “properly interpreting the day”. They could combine certain aspects of clock time to synchronise and order activities, while moving away from its unremitting beat by drawing on and enacting notions of task-time, to make decisions about the end of work and its relative importance vis-a`-vis domestic and personal tasks and engagements. This “proper interpretation of the day” required them to find a language of time which is able to accommodate the co-presence of several temporal frameworks: the use of particular dress codes, symbolic and material boundaries and catch-phrases can be seen as efforts to develop linguistic expressions for what is, culturally speaking, a new experience. Conclusion The relocation of paid work into the home environment juxtaposes two previously geographically distinct cultural arenas and their respective temporal orders. This requires teleworkers and their families to make decisions about the temporal organisation of their lives. The beat of institutional and organisational clock time continues to provide a regulated and controllable order for the families we visited. Task time affords them some contingent, flexible decision making beyond the control of internal disciplines. The investigation of home-based (tele)work is developing into a field of interest for organisational researchers. While progress has been made in exploring the patterns and realties of such home-based work, there are other areas in which research could fruitfully inform current understanding. Such areas comprise the relative differences in the experience of home-based work of different occupational groups; the emotional and socio-psychological effects on the teleworkers as well as on other household members; the consequences regarding the (re)formulation of the psychological contract. As there is reason

to believe that this particular form of flexible work will continue to spread, Temporalities of understanding its complexities might go some way towards appreciating the home-based interdependence of time and the social order, and stimulate some debate about telework “how to live one’s life”.

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Pollard, J. (2002), “Long day’s journey into shorter working hours”, Observer Newspaper, 24 March. Reed, M. (2000), “Alternative professional futures: explaining the dynamics and forms of professional change in advanced capitalist societies”, paper presented at 16th EGOAS Colloquium, Helsinki, 2-4 July. Reilly, P. (2001), Flexibility at Work. Balancing the Interest of Employer and Employee, Gower, Aldershot. Sabelis, I. (2001), “Time management. Paradoxes and patterns”, Time and Society, Vol. 10 No. 2/3, pp. 387-400. Sennett, R. (1998), The Corrosion of Character. The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, Norton & Company, London. Seron, C. and Ferris, K. (1995), “Negotiating professionalism. The gendered social capital of flexible time”, Work and Occupations, Vol. 22 No. 1, pp. 22-47. Silver, H. (1993), “Homework and domestic work”, Sociological Forum, Vol. 8 No. 2, pp. 181-204. Sirianni, C. (1991), “The self-management of time in postindustrial society”, in Hinrichs, K., Roche, W. and Sirianni, C. (Eds), Working Time in Transition. The Political Economy of Working Hours in Industrial Society, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA, pp. 231-73. Sirianni, C. and Walsh, A. (1991), “Through the prism of time: temporal structures in post-modern America”, in Wolfe, A. (Ed.), America at Century’s End, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, pp. 421-39. Steward, B. (2000), “Changing times. The meaning, measurement and use of time in teleworking”, Time and Society, Vol. 9 No. 1, pp. 57-74. Sullivan, C. and Lewis, S. (2001), “Home-based telework, gender and the synchronization of work and family: perspectives of teleworkers’ and their co-residents”, Gender, Work and Organization, Vol. 8 No. 2, pp. 123-45. Thompson, E.P. (1967), “Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism”, Past and Presence, Vol. 36, pp. 52-97. Tietze, S. and Musson, G. (2002), “Working from home and managing guilt”, Organisations and People, Vol. 9 No. 1, pp. 34-9. Watson, T.J. and Harris, P. (1999), The Emergent Manager, Sage, London. Weber, M. (1958), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, NY. Young, M. (1988), The Metronomic Society. Natural Rhythms and Human Timetables, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Zerubavel, E. (1979), Patterns of Time in Hospital Life, University of Chicago Press, London and Chicago, IL. Zerubavel, E. (1981), Hidden Rhythms. Schedules and Calendars in Social Life, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Zerubavel, E. (1987), “The language of time. Towards a semiology of temporality”, Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 28, pp. 343-56. Zerubavel, E. (1991), The Fine Line. Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL and London.

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Family-friendly policies in The Netherlands The tripartite involvement Chantal Remery, Anneke van Doorne-Huiskes and Joop Schippers Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands Keywords Work, Family-friendly organizations, Policy, Employment, The Netherlands, Service industries Abstract The article reports on research among Dutch employers concerning the arrangements they provide for employees to help them with the reconciliation of work and family life. The research not only answers the question of to what extent different employers offer arrangements like childcare facilities, flexible working hours or leave schemes, but it also tries to explain employers’ policies. The explanatory analysis includes organisational characteristics and employers’ opinions with respect to costs and benefits of different arrangements. The empirical analysis is based on a survey among 871 organisations in the profit sector and the non-profit sector. One major conclusion is that family-friendly arrangements have become rather common among organisations; employers are aware of the fact that the reconciliation of work and care has become an issue for an increasing number of workers.

Personnel Review Vol. 32 No. 4, 2003 pp. 456-473 q MCB UP Limited 0048-3486 DOI 10.1108/00483480310477533

Introduction In The Netherlands, labour market participation by women took off relatively late by comparison with other European countries. The 1990s in particular saw this gap being closed. As a result, the question of how to combine work and family care became a live issue. This development was mirrored by government policies. As we will show in more detail in the next section a special Work and Care Act (Wet Arbeid en Zorg) came into force at the end of 2001. This means that employers in The Netherlands are faced, more than they used to be up to the recent past, with legal obligations to establish at least minimal arrangements to meet the needs of employees who have to combine work and care at home. This changes the institutional context in which employers operate and make their strategic decisions. So far, Dutch (female) workers have developed their own strategy in combining work and family care – by working part-time – with the result that they have largely retained care activities in their own hands. This strategy, however, is no longer adequate or sufficient to solve the problems of combining work and family care, at least not for a growing share of women in The Netherlands. They, and an increasing share of their male partners, need and require more facilities for realising a professional life while having families. In general, in the Dutch culture of labour relations, employers are considered to be important actors in the field of working conditions. This raises the question of how employers react to these

developments and changing institutional constraints. Do employers consider Family-friendly that they have to play a special role in facilitating the combination of work and policies in family life, or is this reconciliation in their view still primarily a private The Netherlands problem to be solved within the family? This article reports on survey research among Dutch employers concerning the arrangements they offer employees for the reconciliation of work and care. 457 Studies that attempt to explain the adoption of family-friendly arrangements in organisations are often based on neo-institutional theories (Goodstein, 1994; Ingram and Simons, 1995; Kossek et al., 1994; Milliken et al., 1998). The starting point is the assumption that there is a growing institutional pressure on employers to develop family-friendly arrangements and to make them part of personnel policy and organisational culture. The institutional approach is important to understand the behaviour of employers and their responses to social change. Theoretically, however, it is missing a clear indication as to why employers respond the way they do. The implicit assumption in institutional theories seems to be that employers are more or less passive actors, who respond to pressure from different sources. The reasons and arguments why they do so are not specified. Based on this criticism, Oliver (1991) developed a typology of different strategies employers use to meet demands from the environment. Goodstein (1994) integrates the perspective of strategic choice in institutional theory and research. The main finding in Goodstein’s research on employers’ involvement in work-family issues is that organisations were more likely to acquiescence to institutional pressures, when these pressures were strong and there was a perception that the adoption of family-friendly initiatives would benefit the organisation and not be overtly costly. A number of other studies of family-friendly facilities within organisations have focused on the costs and benefits of the arrangements (e.g. Glass and Fujimoto, 1995; Holterman, 1995; Dex and Scheibl, 1999; Den Dulk, 2001). The reasoning behind this is that employers weigh the costs and benefits of arrangements, and that they will implement arrangements if the benefits outweigh the costs. The institutional environment, consisting of the labour market and the relevant legislation and regulations, is taken into account in their assessment. Research has generally been directed towards the outcome of that assessment. This means that the way in which employers view costs and benefits has not often been the subject of research. In this article, we intend to look explicitly at that aspect. Central questions addressed in this article are: . Which arrangements are supplied by organisations to enable workers to reconcile work and care? . What are employers’ considerations with respects to costs and benefits of different family-friendly arrangements and how do they judge public policy and legal arrangements in this respect? . How can employers’ supply of arrangements be explained, given the changing institutional context in The Netherlands?

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Table I. Combinations of parent couple households by working time arrangement (2000)

Institutional context The Netherlands is known as a country in which employment has grown strongly over the past ten years (Hemerijck and Visser, 1997). As a result, the labour participation rate has risen sharply for both men and women. As already mentioned briefly in the Introduction, the high proportion of parttimers among working women is a feature of the Dutch labour market. This is particularly true of working mothers. Table I shows details of working time arrangements in households with children for a number of European countries. In Dutch households, the majority (almost 53 per cent) opts for a distribution in which the husband has a full-time job and the wife has a part-time job. Only 10 per cent of the households with children have both parents working full-time, while one-third of the families have a single breadwinner. The number of households where the husband works full-time and the wife part-time is also relatively high in some other countries, particularly Germany and the UK. However, the dominant position of what in The Netherlands is known as the “one-and-a-half earners model” is exclusive to The Netherlands. The political debate whether this “choice” really reflects individuals’ preferences or whether, due to a lack of opportunities, families do not see any other option than to supply part of the care themselves, has been going on for a long time and does not look likely to end soon. Partly as a result of this increased participation by women, policy attention to the combination of work and care has increased at government level. After several leave schemes had been introduced over the years, at the end of 2001 a special Work and Care Act (Wet Arbeid en Zorg) came into force (Staatsblad,

Belgium Germany Greece Spain France Ireland Italy Luxembourg The Netherlands Austria Portugal UK

One earner couple

Male PT + Female PT

Male PT + Female FT

Male FT + Female PT

Male FT + Female FT

27.3 39.7 49.7 56.3 36.0 55.5 53.6 51.2 32.7 32.6 26.5 29.8

1.9 0.6 0.9 0.2 1.2 1.1 1.3

1.7 0.7 0.9 0.4 1.1

2.3

1.3 0.9

28.3 32.9 4.7 7.5 16.3 16.2 13.0 23.2 52.9 27.7 7.0 40.0

40.8 26.1 43.7 35.6 45.4 27.1 31.2 25.7 10.8 38.8 66.5 28.6

a a a

0.7

Notes: Ireland: 1997; L, UK: 1999 a No reliable data available Source: Franco and Winqvist (2002, p. 3)

a

0.9 a

a

0.9

2001). The act aims at providing employees with increased possibilities for Family-friendly combining work and care. Existing and new leave schemes are combined and policies in co-ordinated with each other in the act; the leave schemes included are The Netherlands pregnancy and maternity leave, adoption leave and nursing leave, emergency leave, short-term care leave and (unpaid) parental leave. A scheme to finance career interruption also forms part of the new act. A bill for (partially) paid 459 long-term care leave is currently under discussion in the House of Representatives of the States General. As for working hours, The Netherlands also has the Modification of Working Hours Act (Wet Aanpassing Arbeidsduur), which gives workers the option of working for shorter or longer hours under certain conditions. In addition, tax facilities have recently been set up enabling workers to save salary and free time in order to take up paid leave later. Finally, government contributions towards childcare facilities have risen in recent years. As a result, there has been a sharp increase in childcare capacity in an organised context. Together, these legal arrangements constitute the framework for employers and unions to negotiate family-friendly facilities at the industry or company level. The above description may suggest that considerable provision has been made to enable Dutch workers to combine work and care. And certainly The Netherlands does not stand out unfavourably in international studies (see OECD, 2001). However, the various statutory schemes are basic schemes with a limited effect. In line with the Dutch tradition of “shared responsibility” (see Hemerijck and Visser, 1997; Teulings and Hartog, 1998), the government has expressly opted to leave employers or the organisations representing employers and employees respectively (the “social partners”) scope to extend (or not to extend) the schemes in their discussions on collective employment terms. For example, parental leave under the statutory scheme is unpaid, and that holds many employees back from taking it up. Some companies or sectors have an agreement attaching some form of payment to parental leave, but this only occurs to a limited extent (Grootscholte et al., 2000). As for childcare facilities, the tripartite involvement of the government, employers and individual citizens shows even more clearly. About 60 per cent of the childcare places are being financed from government subsidies. Parents pay a contribution for these places depending on their income. Employers and parents pay for the other 40 per cent of childcare places. The size of the employer’s contribution can be part of the collective agreement negotiated between employers and unions or – if it is no part of the collective agreement – can be decided on at the company level. These “private” childcare places are stimulated by the government, which offers employers and parents tax credits. The number of places for children aged 0 to 12 has increased by a factor of five over a ten-year period as a result of the higher government contributions (SGBO, 2001). Despite this, there are still only 4.53 childcare places per 100 children, a supply that is lagging behind the demand (which is also rising).

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So, legal rules and public arrangements explicitly leave room for and call on social partners to play their part in decisions on and the supply of familyfriendly facilities. Moreover, during the 1990s there has been a tendency in negotiations between employers and unions to replace stipulations in collective agreements on the content of specific arrangements on childcare or leave with procedural stipulations that oblige individual employers to develop a particular arrangement at the company level. The specific terms of the arrangement can be decided on at the company level, e.g. after consultation of the works council. This tendency towards decentralisation of terms of employment has shifted the focus with respect to family-friendly arrangements further towards the company level. So, in spite of the statutory framework and the collective agreements between the social partners, there is plenty of scope for individual organisations to make additional provisions. Data A questionnaire was sent to over 3,100 companies and organisations in the (private and public) service industry. The reason to focus the research on this branch of industry is that it has grown substantially during the last years and that it has a relatively high share of female employees. Public administration is excluded since less diversity is expected with respect to family-friendly policies due to comprehensive regulation in that sector. The sample was also restricted to companies with more than nine employees because very small companies often have no explicit personnel policy. The names and addresses of these organisations were taken in part from a sample drawn from the trade register of the Chamber of Commerce. The total response rate was almost 28 per cent, which is lower than the average response rate of individual surveys but comparable to the response rate generally found in corporate surveys (see, for example, Brewster et al., 1994; Kalleberg et al., 1996). Comparing the sample with national data shows no significant differences with respect to distribution of sub-sector and size (categorised in groups). This means that the sample is representative for the Dutch service sector. The questionnaires were completed by a board member/managing director (30 per cent), the owner (9 per cent), office manager/plant manager/town clerk (7 per cent), head of personnel (30 per cent), or by a personnel officer (24 per cent). The questionnaire consisted of a number of parts. The first part contained a number of factual questions on the organisation, such as the number of staff and the existence of a collective agreement. The questions on family-friendly facilities were subdivided into two blocks: (1) measures to make working hours flexible; and (2) terms of employment – leave options and childcare facilities. On flexible working hours, the questionnaire asked whether there are flexible starting and stopping times, part-time work, saving of hours and a scheme for

working from home. In each case, respondents could indicate whether the Family-friendly company had a scheme, or if not whether the introduction of such a scheme was policies in under consideration. Part-time work was an exception, as the Modification of The Netherlands Working Hours Act that was introduced in The Netherlands in 2000 gives workers the right to modify their working hours. So, the question asked on part-time work was whether the organisation applies a policy 461 encouraging part-time work. On the leave options, the questionnaire expressly asked whether organisations have a more generous scheme than the statutory scheme. The schemes covered by the questions relate to leave for pregnancy and maternity leave, leave for partners around the time of the birth, parental leave, emergency leave, long-term care leave and long-term career interruption. Again, the questionnaire asked for each type of leave whether it exists or is under consideration. It also asked about the duration of the (additional) leave, and whether it is paid. Finally, it asked whether the organisation has (or is considering) a childcare scheme for children aged 0-4 and/or after-school childcare arrangements. This was followed by questions on what consequences employees’ combining of work and care have for the organisation, the costs and benefits from arrangements for the organisation, and the factors that play a role in decisions on family-friendly arrangements. As regards the factors influencing the decision to provide family-friendly arrangements, the following possibilities were suggested to the organisations: better image for the organisation, demand from employees, collective agreements, lower absence for ill health, employee satisfaction, social responsibility, costs of facilities, improvement of recruitment ability, possible government subsidies/compensation payments, keeping in line with other organisations in the sector and degree of (expected) use. This list is based on earlier research (e.g. Dex and Scheibl, 1999; Holterman, 1995; Den Dulk 2001). Organisations were also asked whether they had ever evaluated the costs and benefits of facilities in the area of work and care. Finally, the organisations were presented with a list of statements on the subject of the responsibility for family-friendly arrangements. Family-friendly schemes in Dutch organisations: current position There are major differences between organisations in the extent to which they have schemes that can ease the combination of work and family care. The most common scheme relates to flexible starting and finishing times: 66 per cent of the organisations have a scheme of this kind. The possibility of saving hours is also relatively common; it exists in almost 64 per cent of the companies and institutions. Just over half the companies and institutions encourage part-time working, while exactly half have a childcare scheme for pre-school children. Of the various leave schemes, emergency leave is the most common, with almost 45 per cent of the companies and institutions having such a scheme. Over a quarter have a scheme for out-of-school childcare and/or long-term care leave. The other schemes are only present to a very limited extent (see Table II).

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No scheme

Scheme under consideration

Scheme in place

Total

n

Flexible working hours Flexible starting and finishing times Hour saving Encouragement of part-time work Work-from-home scheme

30.3 28.7 40.7 60.8

3.4 7.8 7.6 9.7

66.2 63.5 51.7 29.5

100 100 100 100

871 869 868 867

Leave Emergency leave Long-term care leave Extended parental leave Long-term career interruption Extended pregnancy and maternity leave Short-term maternity leave for partners

48.4 61.6 81.7 73.6 90.1 91.6

6.9 12.1 2.3 11.1 1.0 2.1

44.6 26.3 16.0 15.4 8.9 6.3

100 100 100 100 100 100

869 867 868 867 865 869

35.1 57.8

14.9 13.5

50.0 28.7

100 100

868 864

Schemes

Table II. Summary of the extent to which family-friendly Childcare Childcare scheme schemes are found in Out-of-school care scheme organisations (in %)

It may be noted that the top three most common measures relate to flexible working hours. While measures in this area can certainly be of assistance in combining work and care, this is often not the main purpose of the scheme in all cases. And the reservation may be entered that, in so far as flexible working hours make a better combination of work and care possible, the burden of doing so rests mainly with the worker. The theme of work and care is clearly a current issue in the vast majority of the organisations; only 38 companies (4 per cent) have no schemes whatever in the area of childcare facilities, flexible working hours or leave. What schemes can be expected to be developed further in the coming years? Looking at the proportion of employers that are considering introducing a particular scheme, two stand out clearly above the rest: a childcare scheme (almost 15 per cent) and an out-of-school care scheme (13.5 per cent). Long-term care leave and a scheme for long-term career interruption also come out at above 10 per cent. At only 2.3 per cent, further extension of parental leave is not on employers’ agendas. Costs, benefits and responsibilities What factors count in the decision-making process? As was already mentioned in the introductory section, many authors support theoretical insights arguing that actual or perceived costs and benefits, together with employers’ views on who is responsible for ensuring that workers can combine work and care activities adequately, play a role in the provision of facilities. This theme is the subject of our second research

question, which we will try to answer in this section. The dataset contains Family-friendly information on the importance which organisations themselves state that they policies in attach to a series of factors in reaching decisions on whether or not to provide The Netherlands family-friendly facilities (see Table III for an overview). The items proposed to employers include both factors referring to costs and benefits and one item that expressly refers to the social responsibility felt by the 463 company. It appears that employee satisfaction is an important factor for companies; 90 per cent say that such satisfaction is very important or important. Employee demand and lower absence for ill health follow, with scores of 80 per cent and 70 per cent respectively. Slightly lower percentages are found for collective agreements, cost of facilities, improvement of recruitment ability and keeping in step with other organisations. Social responsibility, (expected) use and possible subsidies are mentioned relatively less often (although still by over half of the organisations) as important or very important. There therefore appears to be a tripartite division in the importance of the various factors: the organisation’s own employees are given most weight, followed by the organisation’s direct environment (sector, competition, labour market), with the wider environment (society as a whole) as the least important factor. When more specific questions are asked on the costs experienced by employers, it is striking that the direct costs of childcare facilities are mentioned relatively infrequently. Employers refer much more frequently to high costs resulting from replacing employees who are on leave, and higher co-ordination costs because more employees are working part-time. Approximately half of the organisations experience these consequences.

Organisation’s own employees Employee satisfaction Employee demand Lower absence for ill health Improvement of recruitment ability Costs of facilities Degree of (expected) use Direct environment Keeping in line with other organisations in the sector Collective agreements Better image for the organisation Wider environment Social responsibility Possible government subsidies/ compensation payments

(Very) unimportant

Neutral

(Very) important

Total

n

2.1 4.3 6.8 4.7 4.6 6.8

8.0 14.3 22.5 28.0 30.9 33.2

89.9 81.4 70.7 67.4 64.5 60.0

100 100 100 100 100 100

850 853 853 855 857 852

8.4 14.9 8.9

25.1 19.7 31.7

66.4 65.4 59.4

100 100 100

7.4

38.1

54.4

100

10.6

35.1

54.3

100

Table III. 855 837 Employers’ assessments of the importance of 852 various factors in their decisions on the provision of 860 family-friendly arrangements 858

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A similar, more detailed, approach to the questions on the benefits experienced by employers shows that in particular, employers consider that providing family-friendly arrangements contributes to higher employee work satisfaction (71 per cent) and greater attractiveness to potential employees (69 per cent). Employers scarcely see any benefits from family-friendly arrangements as far as absence for ill health and productivity are concerned; less than 5 per cent of the employers are of the view that family-friendly arrangements have the effect of increasing productivity to a large extent and one-third think that this is the case to some extent, while 60 per cent respond that this is scarcely if at all the case. One in ten employers takes the view that facilities for combining work and family care activities contribute substantially to lower absence for ill health, while nearly 40 per cent feel that they contribute to some extent. So according to employers, family-friendly facilities appear to have more direct importance for recruitment than for staff turnover. They mean that workers feel happier, but not that they work better or harder. Of course, higher work satisfaction can in fact contribute to a lower staff turnover. It is also notable that although nearly 70 per cent of the organisations consider that offering family-friendly facilities contributes to the organisation’s attractiveness to potential employees, only one organisation in six states that it uses these facilities to raise its profile. While employers view all the factors mentioned above as important in their decision making on whether or not to provide family-friendly arrangements, it is evident that in fact organisations do not have much insight into the costs and benefits of family-friendly facilities: in reply to the question whether the organisation has ever evaluated costs and benefits, only 3 per cent state that they do so regularly and 20 per cent that this is done occasionally. Over three-quarters of the organisations have never carried out any such evaluation. Who is responsible for family-friendly facilities? The employers were asked who is responsible for family-friendly facilities. Are these facilities the responsibility of the state or the employers, or is neither of these parties responsible? In the latter case, it is purely up to workers themselves to create the conditions that allow them to combine paid work with care activities. As has been pointed out previously, The Netherlands is a country of “shared responsibility”. The dominant political view in The Netherlands is that the state is not held solely responsible for the ability to combine work and care; the social partners are equally responsible. This study too shows that the majority of the respondents agree with the basic philosophy of the modern Dutch approach to socio-economic questions (the “polder model”): almost three-quarters of the organisations believe that employers and the state are jointly responsible for ensuring that workers are able to combine their work properly with care activities. A small minority (13 per cent) considers that employers alone are responsible for this kind of provision, while

10 per cent feel that the responsibility lies exclusively with the workers Family-friendly themselves. However, what government should do and what mainly concerns policies in employers depends on the type of facility. Childcare facilities and out-of-school The Netherlands care are viewed primarily as a state responsibility. At a discussion of the survey results, a number of employers stated that childcare facilities should be just as normal as primary education and health care. These facilities are 465 provided by the state, so why should childcare not be? Equally, there is a tendency to look primarily to the state on leave schemes: one-third of the respondents do not see themselves as the players with primary responsibility for long-term paid care leave and paid parental leave, while 40 per cent think that employers and the state bear joint responsibility in these matters. The situation is different for short-term care leave. Here, the employers clearly see themselves as having primary responsibility. This is even more the case where schemes relating to working hours are concerned. More than 60 per cent of the respondents place responsibility exclusively with the employer for part-time work and variable working hours. And while a third of respondents consider that the state also has a role to play in these matters, this should definitely be in combination with employers. It is clear that employers do not want the state to interfere in practical matters, such as schemes on working hours. The argument is that “the state must not usurp the employer’s position and try to make detailed rules on what happens on the shop floor”. These outcomes are thrown into still higher relief when we look at the roles that employers ascribe to themselves in more abstract terms on work and care issues. At a discussion of the survey results several employers characterise their own positions as “following” and pragmatic. While they will not themselves take any initiatives in the area of work and care, they will look on them favourably if the situation is evidently such that work-care provisions are necessary to obtain and retain good staff. However, employers are generally declared opponents of arrangements that are excessively collective, and therefore in their view rigid. They prefer to see family-friendly facilities that are tailored to the individual situation. Customised provision also gives employers the opportunity to do a bit more for good and valuable employees. Also, for most employers a benevolent and pragmatic attitude towards family-friendly facilities does not mean that they want to project a strong image in society in this area. They prefer to look to other matters to build their image as an attractive employer. Concepts such as innovation, flexibility, care for the quality of their own product and attention to employees’ human capital score highly in that respect. Why do employers supply particular arrangements? To answer the question which factors favour employers’ supply of familyfriendly arrangements we performed multivariate analysis to analyse what

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factors can explain the total number of arrangements provided per organisation. Based on theoretical insights and earlier empirical results we included a series of independent variables in the analyses. These variables are first, a number of organisation characteristics, namely: . the existence of a collective agreement; . the size of the organisation; . the proportion of women among the staff; . the growth in staff numbers in recent years; . the proportions of low-skilled and high-skilled employees on the staff; . the degree to which the organisation has difficulties in finding and in retaining staff; . the number of employees aged under 45; and . the sector (commercial services, health and welfare, transport, retail, hotel and catering) in which the organisation is active. Second, they are indicators for the degree in which (according to employers) particular factors play a role in the provision of family-friendly facilities. The following factors have been distinguished: intangible/“idealistic” factors: . financial factors (see below); . perceived benefits; . increased recruitment strength; . the wish by men within the organisation to combine work and care; . the support for the position that care activities are private matters; and . employees’ autonomy in the way they carry out their duties. As expected, the existence of a collective agreement, which often contains clauses on family-friendly facilities, is a stimulus to organisations’ provision of such facilities. Large organisations have more financial and personnel resources than small organisations, and as a result they can more easily bear the costs of providing facilities and can link staff to particular work in such a way that part-time work and leave are also possible. On the one hand, a high proportion of women on the staff means greater pressure on the organisation’s management to create or expand certain provisions, but on the other hand a large proportion of women makes it more expensive to provide such facilities. Accordingly, the final effect of this factor is uncertain as the two effects offset each other. A large proportion of highly-skilled employees encourages the provision of family-friendly facilities because their human capital is important for the organisation’s continuity. This need for continuity means that the presence of a large number of highly-skilled employees may be expected to have its greatest effect on the supply of childcare facilities, since these make the maximum contribution to the actual presence in the workplace of employees

with care activities. While part-time work and leave prevent highly-skilled Family-friendly employees having to give up their jobs because of care activities, from the policies in organisation’s perspective they have the disadvantage that they place The Netherlands restrictions on the deployment of the employees making use of the facility. A large proportion of easily replaceable low-skilled employees does not provide employers with any incentive to make family-friendly provision available. 467 Growth in staff numbers is an indicator for the organisation’s current position; whereas contraction will rapidly place pressure on the resources for familyfriendly facilities, growth will often be accompanied by more readily available resources, also for family-friendly facilities. In addition, growth in staff numbers is often accompanied by a fall in average age. A larger proportion of employees aged under 45 will cause an increase in the need for family-friendly facilities, first, because there are more people with young children in that age group, and second, because the wish to combine family and work is stronger in younger-generation employees than in older generations. Difficulties in finding and retaining staff may be a reason for offering additional facilities to combine work and care activities, as well as a consequence of the previous lack of such facilities. In the light of the suggested causal relationship, we expect labour market shortages to have a positive effect on the supply of childcare facilities. If there is already a shortage of staff, an organisation will be less inclined to make leave facilities available for current employees or to encourage part-time work; however the provision of such facilities can provide a stimulus to the recruitment of new staff, and as a result, the final effect on the total number of facilities is uncertain. The branch of industry within which an organisation is active is an indicator both for the tradition within that industry – transport, retail and hotel and catering traditionally have few family-friendly facilities, although there is a great deal of part-time work – and, e.g. for profitability, which is high in commercial services and low in hotels and catering. In addition, the hotel and catering industry has a large proportion of flexible employees, and therefore relatively loose ties between the organisation and parts of its staff. In commercial services and the health and welfare sector we expect a relatively good supply of family-friendly facilities, with the emphasis on childcare provision in commercial services and on leave in health and welfare. By contrast, we expect few provisions in hotels and catering. Organisations where “intangible” factors are a significant consideration in the decision making on family-friendly facilities may be expected to provide more facilities. Considerations that do not affect the organisation’s own immediate interests but for example the interests of part of its workforce will also play a role. Where financial factors are important, this will generally have a negative effect on the provision, or else organisations will be more selective in what they offer and to whom. The supply of family-friendly facilities will increase in proportion to the benefits perceived by employers. This applies equally if employers believe they have a positive effect on their recruitment,

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and if more men state that they want to combine work and family duties. The more organisations see family care activities as private matters, the less inclined they will be to make efforts in this area. If employers state that employees are relatively autonomous in the performance of their work, this may be seen as an indicator of the organisation’s “modernity”. “Modern” organisations may be expected to provide more facilities than traditional organisations. More specifically, greater autonomy for staff will have a positive effect on the promotion of part-time work and leave schemes in particular; employees will then be expected to take on the main burden of the additional co-ordination themselves. It has been discussed above how various factors relating to the costs and benefits of facilities may play a role in decisions whether to provide familyfriendly facilities. Factor analysis has been used to investigate whether different dimensions can be distinguished in these factors, or in other words whether particular factors occur in combination. That does in fact prove to be the case: the ten factors listed in the questionnaire can be reduced to two dimensions (see also Table III). The first dimension covers the factors of the organisation’s image, employee demand, lower absence for ill health, employee satisfaction, social responsibility and improvement of recruitment ability. All these factors relate to some extent to an interest going beyond the organisation’s immediate or short-term interests. We have called this dimension “intangible factors” in the analysis. The internal consistency of the dimension can be described as good (alpha ¼ 0.81). The second dimension covers the following factors: . costs of facilities; . possible government subsidies/compensation payments; . degree of (expected) use; and . keeping in step with other organisations. These factors relate mainly to the organisation’s immediate or short-term interests. We have called this dimension “financial factors”; once again, the internal consistency of the dimension can be described as good (alpha ¼ 0.68). Organisations scoring high on this dimension find these costs important or very important in decisions on whether to provide family-friendly facilities. The two dimensions have been used as two independent variables; for this purpose, the scores on the variables have been added together and divided by the total number of variables. A factor analysis was also carried out to investigate whether dimensions can be distinguished in the benefits of family-friendly facilities. This shows that the scores on the various items form a single dimension. The internal consistency can be described as good (alpha ¼ 0.86). That is, organisations with high scores on these variables see benefits from the provision of family-friendly facilities. Effectively, this means that if organisations see benefits, they see

them in all the areas mentioned. A single “benefits” variable, consisting of the Family-friendly average score for the six answers, has therefore been constructed. policies in Table IV shows that a substantial part (almost 40 per cent) of the variation The Netherlands in the number of work-share schemes per organisation can be explained with the assessed model. Large organisations (over 250 employees) have more family-friendly schemes than small organisations. This is also true of 469 organisations with a higher proportion of women and a higher proportion of highly-skilled staff, and also where there is a collective agreement. By contrast, organisations with a high proportion of lower-skilled staff have fewer provisions. Equally, the greater the role played by intangible factors in decision making and where there are more men combining work and care, organisations are more likely to have family-friendly facilities. The effects found are in line with the theoretical expectation in all cases. For a series of factors, we also find the effect expected on theoretical grounds, but the effect is (just) not significant. These are financial factors that have a negative influence on the provision of Variable Organisation size Less than 50 employees 50-100 employees (ref.) 100-250 employees Over 250 employees Proportion of women Proportion of lower skilled staff Proportion of higher skilled staff Proportion of employees under age 45 Sector Retail, hotel and catering Transport and other (ref.) Commercial services Health and welfare Collective agreement (1 ¼ yes) Movements in staff size in recent years Difficulty in finding staff Difficulty in retaining staff Intangible factors in work-care choice Financial factors in work-care choice Benefits from family-friendly facilities Degree of autonomy in performance of work Degree to which men combine work and care “Care activities are private matters” Family-friendly facilities assist recruitment Constant R 2 (corrected) N Note: * p , 0.01

Coefficient

T value

2 0.14

20.77

0.31 1.22* 0.02* 2 0.08* 0.01* 2 0.07

1.61 5.77 4.41 22.70 3.74 21.57

2 0.39

21.58

0.16 0.23 0.81* 2 0.04 2 0.12 0.19 0.56* 2 0.21 0.19 0.08 0.22* 2 0.13 0.11 2 0.06 0.39 798

0.64 0.72 4.36 20.40 21.10 1.51 3.28 21.50 1.71 0.93 2.92 21.76 1.15 20.07

Table IV. Results of OLS regression analysis to explain the total number of family-friendly schemes

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facilities, the positive effect of the degree to which benefits from family-friendly facilities play a part in decision making, and the negative effect of the degree to which organisations subscribe to the position that care activities are private matters. The analysis does not show any differences between the different sectors. In addition to the above analysis, we carried out logistic regression analyses for three common schemes in order to investigate how the various factors included in the above analysis influence the existence of these specific schemes. The schemes in question are: . policy encouraging part-time work; . a parental leave scheme that is more generous than the statutory scheme; and . a scheme for childcare (for children aged 0-4). The schemes were selected first, because they may be regarded as typical for the category to which they belong and can make a substantial contribution to resolving workers’ problems in combining work and care. Second, there is the practical consideration that analyses of this type can only be carried out for schemes that occur frequently enough in organisations. The results of the three logit analyses to explain the presence of policies favouring part-time work, extended parental leave and childcare, respectively are very similar to those presented in Table IV[1]. However, in each of the three logit estimates only some of the significant effects of the previous analyses were found. In none of the three estimates we find additional significant effects. This seems to imply that the number of arrangements supplied by an employer and employers’ decisions on (these three) particular arrangements are guided by the same factors. The factors that are relevant for the explanation of employers’ behaviour with respect to the supply of family-friendly arrangements include both structural factors (like company size and the composition of the organisation’s staff) and employers’ judgements with respect to costs and benefits of such arrangements. Discussion and conclusion The research presented in this article shows first, that facilities to combine work and care have become a matter of course in many organisations. However, the research also shows that for many organisations, providing facilities seems to be an issue that “they cannot escape”. Organisations are well aware that more and more workers are combining (or wishing to combine) work and care activities, and they are increasingly faced by the fact that workers have been making demands on this point, particularly in the tight labour market of recent years. The research also shows that employers are aware of their share in the tripartite responsibility for the supply of family-friendly facilities, as it has developed in The Netherlands throughout the last decades.

Of the schemes within organisations that are specifically directed towards Family-friendly promoting the combination of work and care, childcare schemes occur most policies in frequently (in 50 per cent of the organisations). Emergency leave follows at 44 The Netherlands per cent. Flexible starting and stopping times (66 per cent of the organisations) and saving of hours (63 per cent) are more frequent, but these schemes are generally not aimed primarily at the combination of work and care, and in 471 practice they certainly do not always actually contribute to easing that combination. In the case of flexible working hours, the schemes practically always apply to all employees, by contrast to the situation for childcare, for instance. Formal arrangements for childcare and out-of-school care (25 per cent of the organisations) are found relatively frequently, partly under the influence of the external requirements laid down for such schemes. Informal arrangements such as those that exist relatively frequently for leave often leave it open who is entitled to a particular form of leave, and under what circumstances. In such cases, the extent and nature of the “entitlements” often remain unstated too. Explicit cost-benefit assessments of facilities are generally not carried out, partly in view of the obvious inevitability of having to do “something” about provisions of this kind. Having to do something, because – apparently – the world has changed. This argument touches upon the so-called business case, which Lewis (1996) describes as the view that recognising the connectedness of people’s work and personal lives is a strategic business adaptation. The business argument moves away from the view that organisational change is a luxury or a moral imperative, as Lewis argues. This adaptation, however, from Dutch employers to changing conditions, is basically pragmatic. It is not primarily a conviction that setting up arrangements is, in terms of business or strategic planning, the best thing to do. More so, it is seen as the most adequate or sensible response to a changing environment. This attitude of pragmatism does not mean that organisations have no ideas about the costs and benefits. Yet, their ideas on the costs are more clearly formulated than their ideas on the benefits. When speaking about the costs of arrangements and facilities, employers often refer to the danger of discontinuity in the organisation’s work. They relate such discontinuity to both leave and part-time work. Far fewer employers refer to high childcare costs as a consequence of the combination of work and care; here it is “only” a question of money. Benefits are perceived mainly in terms of greater employee satisfaction, and that is also the primary reason for setting up provisions. When employers set up provisions, the interest of their own employees is the decisive factor in doing so. Few organisations see opportunities and/or have the need to make use of work-care provisions to raise their profile, whether on the labour market or towards customers or society in general. No real “leaders in the field” can be pointed to in this area, and employers certainly do not seem to be contending for that position. Their strategy is “to go with the flow”. This strategy – which can be

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characterised as rational from their particular perspective – fits with the way work-life issues have been dealt with in The Netherlands throughout the years. Just like all other “big issues” in socio-economic life family-friendly arrangements are seen as a common responsibility of the government, employers and workers (in this case: parents). This tripartite involvement results in a cautious approach by all actors. The government wants to see more extensive institutional changes to enable more women and men to combine work and family care in order to make economic independence available to more women and care independence to more men. That same government knows that it greatly depends on employers to realise the actual changes on the shop floor. Employers that perceive strong political support for particular family-friendly arrangements cannot afford strong and persistent opposition under penalty of undermining the typical Dutch consensus approach. If they obstructed this consensus approach, they would be running the risk of farreaching government measures and losing influence on the content and nature of these measures. To secure their part in the tripartite involvement and shared responsibility employers opt for the strategy of “going with the flow”. What is to be expected for the future of family-friendly facilities in The Netherlands? As we have seen, only a business case argument may tempt employers to take the lead on new initiatives. However, given the economic and political tide at present the business case argument does not seem to be a particular powerful one and employers will not be inclined to extend provisions rapidly. Gloomy prospects for the Dutch economy and the necessity for cuts in the government budget may – apart from any political objections – also stand in the way of a further extension of public family-friendly arrangements. Moreover, owing to the deteriorating labour market conditions workers – with the possible exception of some scarce categories such as the highly skilled – lack the power to extract agreement to any extension of provision. This suggests that stagnation in the development of family-friendly provisions within organisations is in prospect for the coming years. As a result, providing one’s own family care combined with a part-time job may remain the only effective strategy for the reconciliation of work and family life for many Dutch mothers, full participation in the labour market will remain impossible for them, and The Netherlands will retain the special position in the European context that it has already held for so long. Note 1. The results are available on request from the authors. References Brewster, C., Hegewisch, A., Mayne, L. and Tregaskis, O. (1994), “Methodology of the Price Waterhouse Cranfield Project”, in Brewster, C. and Hegewisch, A. (Eds), Policy and Practice in European Human Resource Management, Routledge, London, pp. 230-45.

den Dulk, l. (2001), Work Family Arrangements in Organisations, Rozenberg Publishers, Amsterdam. Dex, S. and Scheibl, F. (1999), “Business performance and family friendly policies”, Journal of General Management, Vol. 24 No. 4, pp. 22-37. Franco, A. and Winqvist, K. (2002), “Women and men reconciling work and family life”, Statistics in Focus, Vol. 3 No. 9. Glass, J. and Fujimoto, T. (1995), “Employer characteristics and the provision of family responsive policies”, Work and Occupations, Vol. 22 No. 4, pp. 380-411. Goodstein, J.D. (1994), “Institutional pressures and strategic responsiveness: employer involvement in work-family issues”, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 37 No. 2, pp. 350-82. Grootscholte, M., Bouwmeester, J.A. and de Klaver, P. (2000), Evaluatie Wet op het ouderschapsverlof. Onderzoek onder rechthebbenden en werkgevers. Eindrapport, Elsevier Bedrijfsinformatie, Den Haag. Hemerijck, A.C. and Visser, J. (1997), “A Dutch Miracle”: Job Growth, Welfare Reform and Corporatism in The Netherlands, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam. Holterman, S. (1995), “The costs and benefits to British employers of measures to promote equal opportunity”, in Humphries, J. and Rubery, J. (Eds), The Economics of Equal Opportunities, Equal Opportunities Commission, Manchester, pp. 137-54. Ingram, P. and Simons, T. (1995), “Institutional and resource dependence determinants of responsiveness to work-family issues”, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 38 No. 5, pp. 1466-82. Kalleberg, A.L., Knoke, D., Marsden, P. and Spaeth, J. (1996), Organizations in America: Analyzing Their Structures and Human Resource Practices, Sage, London. Kossek, E.E., Dass, P. and DeMarr, B. (1994), “The dominant logic of employer-sponsored work and family initiatives: human resource managers’ institutional role”, Human Relations, Vol. 47 No. 1, pp. 1121-49. Lewis, S. (1996), “Rethinking employment: an organizational culture change framework”, in Lewis, S. and Lewis, J. (Eds), The Work-Family Challenge, Sage Publications, London. Milliken, F.J., Martins, L.L. and Morgan, H. (1998), “Explaining organizational responsiveness to work-family issues: the role of human resource executives as issue interpreters”, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 41 No. 5, pp. 580-92. OECD (2001), “Balancing work and family life: helping parents into paid employment” in Employment Outlook 2001, OECD, Paris, pp. 129-66. Oliver, C. (1991), “Strategic responses to institutional processes”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 16, pp. 145-79. SGBO (2001), Kinderopvang in gemeenten. De monitor over 1999, SGBO, Den Haag. Staatsblad (2001), Wet Arbeid en Zorg (Statute Book of Ihe Netherlands), No. 625/644. Teulings, C.N. and Hartog, J. (1998), Corporatism and Competition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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Dealing with part-time work Bastiaan W. Rosendaal Free University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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Keywords Part-time work, Performance, Job evaluation, Environment Abstract This paper examines the relationship between the length of the working week and the performance of employees. It looks at the influence of job features like knowledge intensity, connectivity with other people in the organisation and standardisation; and characteristics of the job environment like stability, flexibility of working schedule and the communication infrastructure. The results indicate a positive effect of shorter working times on task performance. A breaking point of minimum working hours is found between jobs, only directed to task performance and jobs in which the contextual performance and knowledge intensity play a major role.

Introduction The labour market in Europe has seen a steady growth in part-time work. The Netherlands has even been called the first part-time economy in the world (Freeman, 1998; Visser, 2000). The impressive growth of employment in The Netherlands cannot be understood without considering part-time work, which comprises 37 per cent of all jobs. A comparable, although less distinct trend is seen in the UK (Cowling and De Ruyter, 2001). Employers are divided about these developments. Many service industry organisations prefer to work with part-time workforces, but other companies prefer to employ their employees on a full-time basis. Because of the changes in the labour market and in legislation shorter working hours can become a source of conflict between employers and employees. Our research explores the problems of employees and particularly employers, dealing with part-time work. Employers are for instance anxious about higher overhead costs, more time wasted on deliberations, less commitment and slower learning cycles. On the other hand, they have to deal with people who desire more spare time for the raising of children and other activities. Higher wages in several branches and the joint incomes of couples help to fulfil these wishes. Mellor et al. (2001) suggest that shorter and more flexible working hours are not only good for the increase of higher affective commitment, but it also avoids pitfalls associated with “buying people” and overemphasising continuance commitment, the state in which people are trapped by their organisations, because of the high personal cost of leaving. The objective of our research is to give better insight into the consequences of stable part-time jobs for organisations. We try to answer the question, Personnel Review Vol. 32 No. 4, 2003 pp. 474-491 q MCB UP Limited 0048-3486 DOI 10.1108/00483480310477542

The author’s research was financed by the commission “Plan for the Day”, a commission of the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment. The research is carried out in co-operation with Duojob (www.duojob.nl), a consultancy firm that helps organisations to improve the balance between work and private life.

“Which features of the job and the job environment have influence on the performance of employees and to what extent does the length of the working week influence these relations?”. We look at different aspects such as the kind of contract, working hours, position, knowledge intensity, autonomy and standardisation of work, indispensability of the position, communication dependency. With features of the job environment we mean all features in the direct environment with the aim to improve the effectiveness and the attractiveness of the work. One can think of the ICT-infrastructure, but also of the stability of the environment and the flexibility with assigning timetables. We confront these features with indicators for the performance and functioning of individual employees. We distinguish different groups in our research: managers, professionals and other workers. Part-timers or full-timers: looking for differences The growing trend towards alternative or irregular permanent contracts can be observed in all industrialised countries (Belous, 1989). More than 80 per cent of the net job growth in the European Union (EU) between 1983 and 1994 is on account of part-time work (Cowling and De Ruyter, 2001). What are the driving forces in the growth of part-time work? For a growing number of students, women, and also for a group of men, part-time jobs are an opportunity to combine their needs for work and income with those of an education or taking care of a family (Peterson, 1993). Shortages on the labour market stimulate the willingness of employers to create part-time work. However, there are also strong supporters of theories in which the growth of part-time jobs is seen as an outcome of changing preferences of employers and of economic changes (Tilly, 1992). Part-timers can be brought in for specific hours, and their flexible work schedules can be better adapted to strong variations in the amount of work at different times. Several studies have shown that lower costs of wages are benefits to employers (Barlin and Gallagher, 1996). Part-time work improves an efficient deployment of people in several areas. The shift in mature economies from manufacturing to service-industries, where part-time work is most frequently located, further increases the demand for shorter and deviating contracts. So employers find themselves in a confusing situation: they are eager to take advantage of part-timers and achieve greater flexibility. At the same time they tend to stereotype part-time workers as less stable and less committed, being more difficult to deploy continuously (Hunter et al., 1993). Is their judgement correct? Do part-timers only fit in the periphery and not in the core of the organisation? Most research on part-time work emphasises worker attitude and is focused on job satisfaction and commitment. Paradoxical results from several studies show all outcomes imaginable: more satisfied part-timers, more satisfied full-time workers and no significant difference between the two (Lee and Johnson, 1991). Variables like gender, age, family status and education, the

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kind of contracts and work schedules and the nature of the work often mask differences. Several findings here suggest that job characteristics like variety, autonomy and task identity better explain the differences in job satisfaction and commitment than the length of the working week. Lee and Johnson (1991) relate the differences in commitment and job satisfaction to the kind of contract people have. No difference is found between full-time and part-time workers as long as they are employed according to a preferred contract. The consistency between preferred and actual work schedule is a source of difference in job satisfaction and commitment, whether the contract is full-time or part-time (Barlin and Gallagher, 1996). The same can be said about the temporary nature of contracts. Part-time workers with permanent schedules show higher satisfaction and motivation than their temporary colleagues (Feldman, 1990). The first group also is distinguished by less turnover and fewer conflicts. Comparable results are produced by Walsh and Deery (1999), who show that primary income earners with a part-time job, and non-student temporary employees, often prefer alternative contracts and are more dissatisfied with their work. This group tends to be younger and better educated. Part-timers who are more committed and satisfied, adjust their working patterns to their family, education or other outdoor activities. Their attitudes and preferences are more consistent with the demands of their organisation. Other aspects investigated are turnover rates and absenteeism. Part-timers show lower absenteeism and a higher turnover. However, here too we see large variations as a result of influence of variables such as age, industry and the quality of work. Smulders (1993) considers that part-time workers are less exposed to absence reducing and inducing forces. The nature of the part-time jobs is that they often generate more stress but the physical and mental burdens are less. Frequency and duration of absence turn out to be more related to type of work than to work schedules. The research on the relationship between performance or productivity and employment status is unfortunately limited. The findings vary according the kind of work. Part-timers are more productive in high stress or high client contact jobs (Leighton, 1991). Other research could not determine significant differences (Barlin and Gallagher, 1996). When we see the results of comparisons between dichotomously part-time and full-time employees, it is difficult to speak of homogenous groups. The heterogeneity within groups of part-time workers makes it worthwhile to investigate the internal differences. Some time ago Horn (1979) suggested looking at the “peripherality” of the jobs made-up by the numbers of working hours and the regularity of employment. Shorter working weeks and temporary contracts reduce the sense of belonging to the organisation. People miss parts of the common experience. They are less obvious focal points and their work is lower on the agenda. Horn (1979) found some evidence for these conjectures with temporary workers, but not with the part-timers with fixed contracts. He even found an optimal working time for job

satisfaction of between 16 and 25 hours. Walsh and Deery (1999) also insist that the contrast between core and periphery is not very helpful to the comparison of different groups of workers. People’s expectations of their job, the sense making of work in their personal life and the way they are able to combine work with other obligations seem to be more important aspects. For many of them it is difficult to combine work and family (Fu and Shaffer, 2001). Part-time jobs can provide a better balance between family and work, although there is a serious trade-off in terms of career prospects. We notice that part-time work is a widely explored area, but predominantly with other output variables than those we are interested in, namely performance differences. We expect, however, to encounter a good deal of the same independent and intervening variables for performance as we see for job satisfaction, commitment or productivity. Therefore this neighbouring research field is important for the modelling of our own project. Research questions From the angle of commitment and job satisfaction there seems to be no reason to withhold a non-standard week schedule from employees. From the economic point of view, managers have to deal with manpower planning, overhead costs and productivity figures, which are influenced by the deployment of the workforce. We shall not pursue this economic aspect. We are interested in the aspects of general and human resource management. We are trying to answer the question which features of the job and the job environment have influence on the performance of people, considering their contracts and working hours. Features of the job are the standardisation in function and tasks, autonomy, monotony, preparation time of primary tasks in the job, knowledge intensity of the work, kind of contract, indispensability of the employee and the kind of job. They mirror the extent to which jobs are appropriate for part-time contracts. Although, in principle, part-time workers can do every job there are a number of complicating factors. The less that workers are dependent on interactions with other people and the easier that the work can be left and started again, the more the job is supposed to be suited for part-time work. So we expect greater standardisation in function and tasks, larger autonomy, less preparation time of primary tasks in the job, less knowledge intensity of the work and less indispensability of the employee, to go together with equal or better functioning on a part-time basis. The reverse will lead to lesser functioning on a part-time basis. The features of the job are measured by means of the WEBA-method, extended with other questions (Vink et al., 1996). This instrument was developed to describe different qualities of jobs, like degrees of complexity, number of organising tasks, autonomy and communication possibilities. It is based on Karasek’s risk model of job stress in which task demands and possibility of control affect workload and pressure, and is comparable to the Job Content Questionnaire (Karasek and Theorell, 1992).

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Features of the job environment are stability of the work environment, shifting possibilities with working hours, communication infrastructure, intensity of internal communication and consultation. These features can be facilitating for the integration of part-time jobs. Part-timers are more likely than full-timers to be sensitive to incidents and changes, since they often have to cope with them in hindsight, returning to their work next week. A lack of organisational communication can easier disrupt their work. The problems of absence are even larger in a highly connected environment. A proper computer and communication infrastructure can counterbalance this drawback. It keeps communication at a reliable level, despite some delay. So we expect that the stability of the work environment, the use of co-operative computer support and a less internal communication will neutralise negative effects of part-time work. Besides the job and environment characteristics, we also look at general features like education, working hours, career perspectives and kind of business. Finally we have to choose indicators for the performance and functioning of employees. The description of these output indicators is a difficult issue, for which many solutions have been found (Mager and Pipe, 1984; Robinson and Robinson, 1989). Borman and Motowidlo (1993) distinguish task and contextual performance, showing that besides carrying out an immediate task, people can contribute in other ways to the performance of the organisation, like helping colleagues or putting in extra effort to complete their work. We choose both interpretations, in which we use three different kinds of indicators. In the first place we want to know about the personal stakeholder satisfaction: what do clients, colleagues and managers think of the employee’s work? Stakeholder satisfaction is an intensively explored research field from the angle of companies (Jones and Wicks, 1999). The concept, however, also fits within a contextual approach to personal performance, since in many service jobs it is the clearest output one can think of. The second aspect has to do with the efficiency of the work: how well are people organising their work and how effectively are they using their time? Since we deal with a scattered population, we cannot depart from key performance indicators that give a clear insight into specific job outcomes (Engelkemeyer, 1998). Instead we have to take generic features like the planning of work, spending time on important tasks and finishing tasks properly (Robinson and Robinson, 1989). In the third place we want to know how people feel about their own performance. Are they satisfied with the job they do at the end of the day? Is there a sense of usefulness and value considering their work? People are questioned about their daily achievement, the output of their work and their functioning. The first aspect is mostly related to contextual performance, the second to task performance while the third aspect has elements of both kinds. Methodology Since we were striving for a broad survey in which we can differentiate between several groups of part-timers we needed a large group of more than

1,400 respondents. We chose a snowball approach, in which several organisations were involved with an active role in the debate on part-time work, including a trade union, an employers’ association and a women’s organisation for female graduate engineers. These organisations supported us by promoting the research and offering publicity in their magazines and Internet sites. A site for recruitment and career development and a site on women and work offered additional entrances to participation in our research. Both sites attract large numbers of serious visitors concerned with their work and career perspectives. The target group for our research consists of people who work at least 7 hours per week with more or less stable prospects. Such people could compete with full-time workers on the labour market. These criteria exclude students and those people for whom work is just a short-term temporary solution to fill a financial gap. We received questionnaires from 1,774 respondents. The 67 respondents who did not fit into the target group (incidental workers and students) or could not be considered as serious respondents (skipping essential or large number of answers) were removed leaving a usable response of 1,707. We had 243 respondents from nine different selected organisations from different business areas. The other participants came via our Internet sources. Nine of the ten respondents worked on a part-time basis and 90 per cent of the participants were women. The average age was almost normally divided (mean ¼ 34 years; SD ¼ 7.8). The contract hours varied between 7 and 38 hours, with peaks at 20 and 32 hours. Most working hours were spread over two-and-a-half to four days. Two-thirds of the respondents had permanent contracts. Looking at the kind of work, we see 10 per cent in managerial functions, 33 per cent in specialist functions and the remaining 57 per cent operational staff. We see functions like accountants, software developers, nurses, a firewoman, bookkeepers, service station attendants and teachers. The various economic branches are well represented, although the sampling procedure is mainly one of self-selection. We did test the quality of the sample by comparing the percentages with those of the National Statistics Bureau (CBS, 2002). As for the education aspect, our sample scores somewhat higher than the Dutch labour force. The amount of people with a higher education is 10 per cent higher, while the number with a lower education is 20 per cent less. The distribution of age in the sample also deviates. The category employees of 25-35 years are, with 22 per cent, over-represented whilst the group above 45 is under-represented with a similar percentage. Looking at the sectors where respondents are working, we see an under-representation of 4 per cent in the industry, building industry and commerce, and an over-representation of 6 per cent in government, healthcare and other service sectors. The sample represents, besides the large proportion women, a somewhat younger and better-educated group, compared with the total labour force. Unfortunately we do not have population data for part-time workers, so we

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cannot check deviations in our real population. We know that part-time work is a more frequent phenomenon in the service sectors and less in the industry. In that sense the observed deviations are explicable. All in all the differences between the population of workers and our sample, are not alarming. We used a questionnaire with 120 items, mainly different sets of questions with Likert scales. Besides the items from the WEBA-instrument we developed our own questionnaire, which was tested and improved in a pilot study with 60 respondents. The internal consistency varies from acceptable to good. There is an overlap in the meaning of some variables, for example between standardisation, monotony, knowledge intensity and internal communication, and also between autonomy and flexibility in working schedules. Given the intrascale correlation the distinctive power of the scale is satisfactory (see Table I). The three scales for the output variables are reconstructed after a factor analysis. The result of the principal components analysis (Table II) shows that we can distinguish four factors. The first three correspond with stakeholder satisfaction, efficiency in daily work and satisfaction with outcome of work. A fourth factor is not used, since the content is too far-removed from the concept of performance. The choice of interviewing employees implicates a choice for self-evaluation with respect to the output variables. Considering the scale of the sample, an alternative would not be feasible. It would be attractive to have access to the evaluation of colleagues or managers to get more reliable results. Notwithstanding the large number of practical problems in such an approach, the pitfalls are well known (van der Heijden, 1998; Beehr et al., 2001). Self-ratings do not correlate very well with managers’ and peers’ ratings. The authors suggest that self-assessments are based on better information on the part of the employees about their work. The consistently higher ratings from self-evaluation do not have to cause difficulties, since they do not distort the internal relations and we do not have to compare them with other criteria. Cronbach’s alpha

Table I. Internal reliability of key variables

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Stability of the work environment Flexibility with assigning time tables for work Standardisation and clarity of function and task Communication infrastructure Indispensability of the employee Autonomy Preparation time of primary tasks in the job Monotony Knowledge intensity of the work Intensity internal communication and consultation Stakeholder satisfaction Efficiency in daily work Satisfaction with outcome of work

0.73 0.80 0.76 0.68 0.72 0.71 0.69 0.66 0.75 0.72 0.82 0.75 0.83

1 Impressions on colleagues Impressions on management Compliments of colleagues Compliments of management Compliments of clients Work planning Lag of time for work tasks Ability to finish tasks Lack of work Daily achievement Satisfaction about output Satisfaction about functioning Understanding of tasks Knowledge of responsibilities Proper expectations

Components and loading 2 3

4

0.76 0.79 0.80 0.75 0.59

Dealing with part-time work

481 0.70 0.77 0.85 0.62 0.80 0.82 0.85 0.62 0.79 0.81

In fact several studies are quite optimistic about self-evaluation, particularly if the evaluation is related to external criteria and if the wish to be accurate is not distorted by the wish to present a better image than is justified. We improved self-evaluation by relating the items in the questionnaire to behaviour instead of opinions. Since the research is anonymous and the outcome has no direct personal consequences, we expect exaggerations of one’s personal performance to be within reasonable limits. Results We start the report with a comparison between the different groups. Next we shall try to discover the effects of job characteristics and the features of the job environment on the outcomes, considering the length of the working week. The third step is a comparison of the contribution of these variables: we want to find out more about the relative significance of the amount of working hours for the efficiency of work against the background of other relevant characteristics. Finally we try to understand more of the phenomenon part-time work by looking at the peripherality of it. To what extent do part-timers belong to the marginal workforce and does this cause inferior performance? Our first and most elementary question is whether part-time work is less efficient or less satisfying, considering the stakeholders and the outcomes of the work. We find a moderate but significant negative association between the hours work per week and the efficiency in the daily work (pmcc ¼ 20.16**). The length of the working week does not really influence the satisfaction of stakeholders nor satisfaction of the work outcome. Searching for the regression between working hours and the outcome in different groups we discover

Table II. Results principal components analysis outcome variables

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significant differences by the operational staff but not by management or specialists (Table III). Unlike managers and specialists, the other workers seem to work more efficiently and are happier with the results of their work when they have a shorter working week. We have to consider, however, that the three groups are different with respect to several variables. The working week of managers and specialists is for instance 5 hours longer than the average 22 hours of the third group. When we look for other kinds of regression we can observe an inverse regression (Figure 1, Df 1584, sign. ¼ 0.000). The line shows that people with fewer contracted hours believe they are more efficient in their work. The gain diminishes when employees work longer than 20 to 30 hours. Degrees of freedom

Table III. Regression: contract hours vs efficiency in daily work and satisfaction with outcomes work respectively

Figure 1. Efficiency and size of contract

Managers Specialists Operational staff Overall Notes: * p , 0.01; ** p , 0.001

179 507 852 1,585

185 518 932 1,646

Standard b coefficient ns ns 20.09** 20.16**

ns ns 2 0.08* ns

How can we interpret the relation between work efficiency and the length of the working week? We shall take a look at the effects of the job features and the features of the job environment. With respect to the job features we expect higher standardisation and clarity of function and task and higher autonomy to neutralise the poorer results because of shorter working times. Neatly arranged jobs in which one can decide about what and how to do the job, are supposed to be less vulnerable to interference. The features preparation time of primary tasks in the job, knowledge intensity of the work and the intensity internal communication and consultation yield better results from the work with longer working weeks. They can be seen as investments for the primary work. The longer the working week, the more the organisation can profit from these efforts. The indispensability of the employee is an interference risk and is obviously negatively related to the outcome for people with smaller jobs. Monotony is less of a problem for part-timers. The fact that monotonous work does not last too long makes the burden lighter. To test our presumptions we use a linear regression analysis. We look at the influence of the working week on the outcome and use the job features in dichotomised shape as a selection variable. In other words: how do the job features interact with the effects of a shorter working week on the work output, especially the efficiency in their work? Four job features do not have any special impact in this part of the analysis: autonomy of the function; the preparation time of the core tasks in a job; intensity of the internal communication; and indispensability leave the regression effect on the same level, whether they are low or high. One would expect that high scores on these features cause problems in small jobs. Maybe we do not find these high scores in the smaller jobs, since these jobs are arranged in such a way that autonomy, indispensability or preparation time are kept to a minimum. Indeed is there some positive correlation between the contract length and, respectively, autonomy and indispensability (pmcc ¼ 0.13** and 0.20**). Standardisation/clarity of function and monotony do interfere with the relation of work outcome and length of the working week. The negative regression diminishes when people score lower on these features. Standardisation and monotony are less important for efficiency when the working week is longer. Being bored at work needs a short working week. Knowledge intensity of the work shows another interference effect. Higher knowledge intensity takes away the obsolescence of longer working weeks on the efficiency of the work. Apparently individual knowledge can be seen as an investment that yields more productiveness whenever used over a longer time (see Table IV). Regarding the features of the job environment, we see an interference effect from the technological infrastructure that helps to improve the communication, like telecommunication and computer support for mail, meetings and agenda

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R2

Degrees of freedom

Standard b coefficient

Low High

0.01

559 776

ns 20.10*

Autonomy of the function

Low High

0.03 0.02

884 700

20.17** 20.16**

Preparation time of primary tasks in the job

Low High

0.02 0.03

653 925

20.13** 20.17**

Indispensability of the employee

Low High

0.01 0.02

716 782

20.11* 20.13**

Knowledge intensity of the work

Low High

0.01

529 881

Monotony

Low High

0.027

674

Standardisation and clarity of function and task

484

Table IV. Regression: contract hours per week vs work efficiency with interaction from job features

20.10* ns ns 20.16**

Notes: * p , 0.01; ** p , 0.001

keeping. It can be stated that especially in the case of small jobs, these means of communication are convenient and help to improve the work. For the other two features there is no clear link, although the difference between high and low stability of the work environment suggest that stability has higher revenue for smaller than for larger jobs (see Table V). Certain aspects of the job and the job environment can enhance or weaken the effect of the amount of working time on the outcome. What are their effects on the outcome, compared among themselves and compared with the length of the working week? Within the set of predictors the amount of working hours per week is not a very dominant variable. If there is any effect, such as satisfaction with the outcome of their work, people with a shorter working week perform better. The variance of stakeholder satisfaction is much more

Table V. Regression: contract hours per week vs work efficiency with interaction from job environment features

R2

Degrees of freedom

Standard b coefficient

Stability of the work environment

Low High

0.03 0.02

748 849

20.18* 20.13*

Flexibility with assigning timetables for work

Low High

0.02 0.03

742 785

20.15* 20.18*

Communication infrastructure

Low High

0.04

495 482

20.20* ns

Note: * p , 0.001

influenced by the knowledge intensity and monotony of the job, be it in a negative way. Knowledge intensity could mean more complexity, which makes it difficult for stakeholders to estimate the value of peoples’ work. Efficiency of work can best be predicted by the job characteristics. We see that standardisation and autonomy enlarge the efficiency, while preparation time and indispensability tend to reduce it (see Table VI). The contribution of the features of the job environment to the variance of working outcome is rather limited, compared to the job characteristics. The number of weekly working hours can be traced here and is on a similar level as stability and communication infrastructure. The relative importance of stability can be understood in connection with the job characteristic standardisation. Obviously these features can help people with small jobs to compensate lack of routine or experience with exceptional situations, compared to their longer working colleagues (see Table VII). Next we want to return to peripherality. Is the more peripheral workforce delivering poorer work, as a consequence of a weaker sense of belonging (Horn, 1979; Walsh and Deery, 1999)? Peripherality is a not an easy concept, but we dispose of two indicators that can tell us where people are located between the core and the borderlines of the organisation. The variable indispensability can be seen as a proper indication, because we expect workers in the core to be more closely knit with the organisation than those who are easy to replace. The second indicator is the kind of contract. Beside temporary or permanent jobs we distinguish jobs arranged by an employment agency, freelance contracts and standby contracts in which the weekly working hours are dependent on the

Working hours per week Standardisation and clarity of function and task Autonomy of the function Preparation time of primary tasks in the job Indispensability of the employee Knowledge intensity of the work Intensity internal communication and consultation Monotony Degrees of freedom R2 Notes: * p , 0.01; ** p , 0.001

Stakeholder satisfaction

Efficiency of work

Satisfaction outcomes work

Excluded

Excluded

2 0.10*

Excluded 0.09*

0.10* 0.15**

0.13** 0.09*

Excluded Excluded 2 0.18**

2 0.16** 2 0.21** 2 0.11*

Excluded 2 0.10* 2 0.13**

0.12* 2 0.17** 788 0.08

2 0.10* 0.14** 992 0.23

Excluded 2 0.46** 1,017 0.18

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Table VI. Regression: job features vs outcomes of work

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Table VII. Regression: job environment characteristics vs outcomes of work

Table VIII. One way analysis of variance: differences in efficiency and the kinds of contracts

workload. We suppose that the steadier the contracts, the more people belong to the core. Both variables indispensability and sort of contract are mutually moderately related (Spearman’s rho ¼ 0.10**) and so is their association with the size of the working week (Spearman’s rho ¼ 0.20**; 0.10**). Indispensability is negatively related to the efficiency of the work (pmcc ¼ 20.27**) and has no significant correlation with stakeholder satisfaction or satisfaction with the outcome. It suggests that for the organisation indispensability of people is not a very positive feature. However, there is a rather clear relation of this characteristic with knowledge intensity, lack of standardisation and the intensity of internal communication (in all cases pmcc ¼ ^0.30**). So different aspects can distort the experienced work efficiency. Indispensable workers have to deal with interruptions, frequent interactions with other people and with more complex work. It shows that they belong to the core of the organisation but that their work is harder to define in terms of task performance. When we compare the efficiency of the work within the contract-forms of employees, we see a significant under-performance of people with a standby contract and a higher performance by the freelancers (Table VIII). People with standby contracts have a very marginal position in the organisation. They do not have to expect much from their work. Rights and payment are mostly limited, which can curb down devotion to their work. Freelancers have a

Working hours per week Stability of the work environment Flexibility with assigning time tables for work Communication infrastructure Degrees of freedom R2

Stakeholder satisfaction

Efficiency of work

Satisfaction outcomes work

Excluded Excluded 0.11* 0.12** 788 0.03

20.11** 0.21** Excluded 0.12** 958 0.08

20.09* 0.08* Excluded 0.15** 980 0.04

Notes: * p , 0.01; ** p , 0.001

Steady job Temps recruited by the organisation Standby contract Temps detached by employment agency Freelancers Total Notes: Df ¼ 1537 p ¼ 0.000

Mean

SD

2.7 2.6 2.1 2.5 3.1 2.7

0.74 0.73 0.58 0.74 0.91 0.74

comparable uncertain and peripheral position, but they are brought into action when the work is urgent or when particular skills are needed. Their marginality is compensated by higher payments and by the perception that their temporary employer is in fact their client. Doing a good job is the best guarantee of being asked again. Unlike Horn’s (1979) findings no differences are found between the other steady and non-standard contracts. The results presented thus far show us several differences, considering the performance of part-timers with jobs of different scope. The influence of features like standardisation, indispensability, knowledge intensity of the job and monotony on performance, differentiated by the length of the working week, lead us to conclude that we are dealing with different kinds of jobs. We saw above that the length of the working week is a feature with a significant but moderate influence on performance, compared to the job related features. These findings make us curious as to more fundamental differences between smaller and larger part-time jobs. The differences can help to explain the observed performance levels. A discriminant analysis was conducted to determine whether the main features of job and job environment could predict the length of the working week. The variables are: stability of the environment, intensity of the internal communication, monotony, autonomy, standardisation, indispensability and knowledge intensity. The length of the job is divided in two categories, one of less and one of more than 19 hours a week. The predictors differentiate significantly among these categories (L ¼ 0.86; X 2= 153.7; p , 0.000). We find scores in which intensity of communication and to a lesser extent knowledge intensity of the job, demonstrate a strong relationship with the discriminant function (Table IX). They go together with larger jobs, while standardisation is a predictor for smaller jobs. Predicting the membership to the job categories 66 per cent is correctly classified (kappa ¼ 0.32). A division in three groups of employees (working , 16 hours, 16-24 hours or . 24 hours) lead to confusion in the middle group. This group could be ill-distinguished from the longer-working group. The analysis shows that the amount of working hours is not the main explanation for the performance. The jobs up till 19 hours are more isolated,

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Standardised coefficient for discriminant function Stability of the environment Intensity of the internal communication Monotony Autonomy Standardisation Indispensability Knowledge intensity

2 0.10 0.71 0.18 0.06 2 0.23 0.05 0.34

Table IX. Discriminant analysis on smaller and larger part-time jobs (n ¼ 1,033)

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standardised and ask less knowledge and skills. It is possible that the performance criteria can be met more easily and that the shorter working week makes people immune from boredom and avoidance behaviour. The longer part-time jobs seem to be more similar to full-time jobs.

Conclusions Regarding the relationship between the outcome from work and the length of the working week for employers the results are ambiguous. At first sight we have seen a moderate negative relation between the amount of contract hours on the one hand, and efficiency of daily work and satisfaction with the output of the work on the other hand. A shorter working week seems to go together with better performance, apart from stakeholder satisfaction, which does not vary with working hours. As in the research literature discussed above, there is little ground for the fear that part-time workers are less valuable employees, compared to their full-time colleagues. To the conclusion that they do not show less job satisfaction (Lee and Johnson, 1991), commitment, or productivity (Barlin and Gallagher, 1996), we can add that the differences in performance are mostly in favour of the part-timers. Are these slightly better results we found for the part-timers a sign in favour of part-time work? Partially, but at least it is not in favour of full-time work. First, we see that the better results stem from the workers on the shop floor. Managers and specialists do not show these differences. Second, we have seen that the regression between working hours and efficiency is inverse, with a curve in the section of the shortest working week. Above the 19 hours the effect disappears. Since almost all specialists and managers work longer than 19 hours, we can expect that the extra efficiency comes mainly from the simpler jobs. Finally, we discovered more general differences between jobs below and above 19 hours. The work that is done in smaller jobs requires less know-how, is better structured and the workers have a less intensive communication with other parts of the organisation. These aspects show us a dichotomy in jobs for which peripherality is an insufficient explanation. Peripherality often has a normative connotation, in which belonging to the core is attractive and belonging to the margins needs to be avoided (Horn, 1979). Walsh and Deery (1999) have already showed us the limitations of this view by pointing to the way people give their work a particular place in their individual and social life. We can add to this that for the vast majority of the respondents working on a part-time basis is their own decision. Since we did not see any relation between the length of the working week and a lack of income we can presume that for many of them part-time work is a satisfactory solution. Being more peripheral for the organisation is no reason for lower performance. Only for workers with a standby contract is the relation with their company so loose that it affects their performance.

Dichotomy in jobs can also be approached from the design side: how are jobs specified by the organisation? Small jobs are less vulnerable to inefficiency if people can pick up their work without much preliminary work, if they do not need intensive communication, and if the investment in the employee is in balance with the possible outcome. It means that for the smaller jobs task performance is more important than the contextual performance in which the environment gains more from the worker, which can also be at the expense of immediate work output (Borman and Motowidlo, 1993). The focus on task performance can explain the better results in small jobs when it comes to efficiency. The contextual performance is required from people with larger jobs. This can be the reason why stakeholder satisfaction is not discriminating between the two groups since this aspect belongs to the contextual performance. So we can state that small jobs (, 19 hours) and good performance go hand in hand as long as the jobs are well structured, knowledge extensive and do not require intensive communication with clients or other stakeholders over longer periods. We can also conclude that more complex professional and managerial work is frequently done on a part-time basis. The fact, however, that these jobs cover at least three days, shows an important time factor. The skills, concentration and approachability that these more complex jobs require, need apparently a minimum time to be effective. We did not find evidence of performance differences within the range between 20 to 45 working hours for the more complex jobs. Whether there is a positive relationship within this category between the requirements and the minimum hours necessary to practise a profession or management function is a question for further research. Such a relation is probably influenced by experience, the familiarity with the work environment, personal capacities and other activities during the rest of the working week. Returning to our central question, which features of the job and the job environment have influence the performance of people, considering their contracts and working hours, we can mention that the main caesura is not between part-time and full-time work, but between jobs smaller and larger than about 19 hours a week. Professional and managerial work is mostly only feasible in a working week of more than two-and-a-half days. There is no clear gain or loss of working outcome above this caesura. Part-timers with smaller jobs are more “productive” than longer-working colleagues when their job is well structured and not much extra effort is needed to prepare or wind down their work. These part-timers work better if they are relieved from activities that deflect their primary tasks. Employers can overcome drawbacks of part-time work, to a certain extent, by taking care of the job environment. Looking at the job environment we have seen that, particularly for people with smaller jobs, stability and a good communication infrastructure increases their performance. For longer working people the possibility to shift working hours has a positive effect.

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References Barlin, J. and Gallagher, D.G. (1996), “Part-time employment”, International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Vol. 11, pp. 243-77. Beehr, T.A., Ivanitskaya, L., Hansen, C.P., Erofeev, D. and Gudanowski, G. (2001), “Evaluation of 360 degree feedback ratings: relationships with each other and with performance and selection predictors”, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 22, pp. 775-88. Belous, R.S. (1989), The Contingent Economy: The Growth of Temporary, Part-time and Subcontracted Workforce, National Planning Association, Washington DC. Borman, W.C. and Motowidlo, S. (1993), “Expending the criterion domain to include elements of contextual performance”, in Schmitt, N. and Borman, W. (Eds), Personal Selection in Organizations, Jossey-Bass, New York, NY, pp. 71-98. CBS (2002), “Cijfers – kerncijfers”, available at: www.cbs.nl/cijfers/kerncijfers/ Cowling, M. and De Ruyter, A. (2001), “Non-standard employment in the EU: personal, industry and firm level determinants of weekly hours”, paper presented at WES-Conference, University of Nottingham, Nottingham. Engelkemeyer, S.W. (1998), “Key measures for organizational performance”, Journal of Innovative Management, Spring, pp. 51-68. Feldman, D.C. (1990), “Reconceptualizing the nature and consequences of part-time work”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 15, pp. 103-12. Freeman, R. (1998), “War of the models: which labour market institutions for the 21st century?”, Labour Economics, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp. 1-24. Fu, C.K. and Shaffer, M.A. (2001), “The tug of work and family: direct and indirect domainspecific determinants of work-family conflicts”, Personnel Review, Vol. 30 No. 5, pp. 502-22. Horn, P.W. (1979), “Effects of job peripherality and personal chacteristics on the job satisfaction of part-time workers”, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 22, pp. 551-65. Hunter, L., McGregor, A., McInnes, J. and Sproull, A. (1993), “‘The flexible firm’: strategy and segmentation”, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 31 No. 3, pp. 383-407. Jones, T. and Wicks, A.C. (1999), “Convergent stakeholder theory”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 24 No. 2, pp. 206-12. Karasek, R. and Theorell, T. (1992), Healthy Work, Stress, Productivity and the Reconstruction of Working Life, Basic Books, New York, NY. Lee, T.W. and Johnson, D.R. (1991), “The effects of work schedule and employment status on organizational commitment and job satisfaction of full versus part-time employees”, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Vol. 38, pp. 204-24. Leighton, P. (1991), “The legal vulnerability of part-timers: is job sharing the solution?”, in Davidson, M.J. and Earnshaw, J. (Eds), Vulnerable Workers: Pychological and Legal Issues, John Wiley, Chichester. Mager, R.F. and Pipe, P. (1984), Analyzing Performance Problems, Pitman, Belmont, CA. Mellor, S., Mathieu, J.E., Barnes-Farell, J.L. and Rogelberg, S.G. (2001), “Employees’ nonwork obligations and organizational commitments”, Human Resource Management, Vol. 40 No. 2, pp. 171-84. Peterson, J. (1993), “Part-time employment and women: a comment of Sundstrom”, Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 27, pp. 909-14. Robinson, D.G. and Robinson, J. (1989), Training for Impact, Jossey-Bass Publishers, Oxford. Smulders, P.G.W. (1993), “Absenteeism of part-time and full-time employees”, Applied Psychology: An International Review, Vol. 43, pp. 239-52.

Tilly, C. (1992), “Short hours, short shrifts: the causes and consequences of part-time employment”, in du Rivage, V.L. (Ed.), New Policies for the Part-time and Contingent Workforce, Economic Policy Institute, Washington, DC, pp. 15-43. van der Heijden, B.I.J.M. (1998), “The measurement and development of professional expertise throughout the career”, PhD thesis, PrintPartners Ipskamp, University of Twente, Enschede. Vink, P., van Rhijn, G., Dhondt, S. and Dul, J. (1996), “Improving technological, organizational and human factors in companies”, in Brown, O. and Hendriks, H.W. (Eds), ODAM-V, Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 551-4. Visser, J. (2000), “The first part-time economy in the world. Does it work?”, paper presented at the Euro-Japan Symposium on the Development of Atypical Employment and Transformation of Labour Markets, AIAS, Amsterdam. Walsh, J. and Deery, S. (1999), “Understanding the peripherical workforce: evidence from the service sector”, Human Resource Management Journal, Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 50-63. Further reading CBS (1997), Meer en minder werken, Sociaal-Economische Maandstatistiek, Den Haag. Steffy, B.D. and Jones, J.W. (1990), “Differences between fulltime and part-time employees in perceived role strain and work satisfaction”, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 11, pp. 321-9. Stichting van de Arbeid (1997), Evaluatie van de nota inzake deeltijdarbeid en differentiatie van arbeidsduurpatronen, Stichting van de Arbeid, Den Haag.

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The management of trust-based working time in Germany Ingo Singe International Trade Union Centre, Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University, Cranfield, UK, and

Richard Croucher Human Resource Research Centre, Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University, Cranfield, UK Keywords Time management, Trust, Germany, Employees Abstract New developments in trust-based working time systems (i.e. systems whereby managers formally devolve their responsibilities for monitoring working time) in Germany are examined. A picture of these systems is presented and the main debates reviewed. It is argued that the successful introduction of such systems is contingent on a number of inter-related factors. These are: company size and management style, external and internal pressures and effective employee representation. It is concluded that such systems are most likely to be successful in larger organisations and that effective employee representation is a key requirement. Current circumstances are not necessarily conducive to the rapid spread of trust-based working time systems.

Personnel Review Vol. 32 No. 4, 2003 pp. 492-509 q MCB UP Limited 0048-3486 DOI 10.1108/004834480310477551

Introduction This article deals with the management of trust-based working time (TBWT) systems in Germany. It attempts to identify the conditions permitting its successful introduction. Current problems and prospects for its further diffusion are also examined. TBWT ends formal management attempts to check and record employees’ working time, and this is its defining feature. Individuals and teams become primarily responsible for fulfilling tasks and meeting targets. Time becomes a secondary consideration. The crucial feature is the shift from a time to a results orientation. A corollary is frequently held to be a clear definition of tasks and quality standards. Individual employees or teams are responsible for organising working time according to tasks, agreed levels and quality of service, and, in accordance with the law, collective agreements and personal contracts’ terms and conditions. Management devolves responsibility for defining and monitoring working time and may turn a “blind eye” to such questions as whether employees exceed the legal limit of ten hours per day. It has been suggested that this in fact occurs. The expression “Arbeiten ohne Ende” (to work without end) has arisen to describe a growing discrepancy between hours agreed actually worked, especially among highly qualified employees in flexible working schemes (IG Metall 2000; Lehndorff, 2001; Pickshaus et al., 2001).

TBWT is absent in many economies. A new and as yet small development, it The management is relatively common in Germany. The apparent paradox is that an economy of TBWT in perceived as highly inflexible in its use of labour has in fact generated an Germany internationally innovative mode of managing working time. This occurs because of the way dense regulation structures German-based companies’ efforts to improve their labour flexibility in the face of increased competition. 493 Although the phenomenon arises in a specific national context, TBWT is of wider interest since it stands at one end of the theoretically possible spectrum of managerial attempts to control working time, i.e. no formal attempt is made to do so. In the early stages of capitalism Marx identified the battle over the length of the working day as a key issue. Many large German employers have now explicitly relegated this issue firmly to the past. Attempts to maximise productivity and reduce costs now demand internalised employee commitment rather than crude measurement of time spent at work. It has been predicted that TBWT will increase in its incidence (Hoff, 2002). However, there is a degree of employer trepidation in taking this step; it is problematic for a range of reasons. For employees, it promises increased autonomy to balance work and non-work requirements but simultaneously threatens to extend the “de-bordering of work” already noted by German sociologists (Do¨hl et al., 2000). The term is used to describe the blurring of demarcation between the spheres of work and life. The distinction between employee and employer becomes blurred as employees actively “produce” and “sell” their own competencies ¨ konomisierung”, both on labour markets and within the organisation (“Selbst-O self-economisation). Self-rationalisation (“Selbst-Rationalisierung”) becomes mandatory, i.e. individuals have to consciously organise and adapt their lifestyles and social relations according to the demands of work (Voß and Pongratz, 1998, Pongratz, 2002; for important criticisms of some of these ideas see Faust, 2002). At a certain point, disappointed employee expectations may threaten benefits such as reduced turnover hoped for by employers. This article is mainly concerned with the conditions under which these problems are avoided or kept within acceptable limits. One difficulty lies in the recent introduction of TBWT, which means that experience is currently only short-term. The nature of these schemes may be illustrated by characteristic case. A “typical” agreement on TBTW covers public employees in the city of Wolfsburg (Hoff, 2002, pp. 21-2). Its main principles are that: . TBWT is to further trust in the workplace. . Employees are themselves responsible in co-operation with work teams to organise times in accordance with the law and sectoral agreements. . Employees participate in keeping to and updating standards (e.g. servicelevels, quality, keeping of deadlines, required staffing levels). . The employer does not check working time.

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It further defines a working time frame (7.00 a.m.-7.00 p.m.). Where employees work outside these hours they have to seek agreement from superiors. Times in which teams have to guarantee service to the public are also defined. Where overload situations occur and excess working times cannot be reduced in the foreseeable future, it is the employee’s duty to consult supervisors, who are responsible for taking measures to reduce workloads or use overtime. Overtime has to be agreed to by the works council. Conflicts are to be resolved in a spirit of co-operation, with the possible involvement of a committee manned by two persons from each management and works council side. The extent of “non-standard” systems in general remains uncertain, but some contours are apparent. Currently, only 15 per cent of all German employees work 35-40 hours, Monday to Friday with no variations (Bundesmann-Jansen et al., 2000). No comprehensive survey of TBTW’s incidence exists. TBWT is a recent development and much less common than other forms of time flexibility. Hoff’s limited survey, drawn from the customer base of his consultancy, within 170 organisations found that TBWT had been implemented in 39 per cent of cases (Hoff and Priemuth, 2001). A further 14 per cent intended to introduce the scheme within the coming three years. TBWT is more widely diffused in the private than in the public sector, and is most common in larger companies. It has been implemented across sectors and for both white-collar and manual employees but there is an above average use of TBWT in service industries. According to these consultants, collective agreements appear rarely to pose a hindrance (93 per cent of enterprises in the sample were party to collective agreements). The ver.di union, an amalgamation of five unions organising three million service workers across both public and private sectors, does not agree with this viewpoint (ver.di, 2000). The union regards TBWT as legally incompatible with existing sectoral agreements that define working hours. However, TBWT is often initially introduced for außertarifliche Angestellte, i.e. white-collar employees outside collective agreements. Pilots are used for evaluation purposes in specific parts of organisations on an experimental basis. It is used by organisations seen as path breakers in working time innovation, such as IBM, Siemens, Schweppes and major banks. Further growth is predicted (Hoff, 2002). We report on an emergent strand of German literature advocating, describing and beginning to identify issues with this way of managing labour, and relate this to other, more developed literatures on manager-employee trust, corporate re-structuring and the current state of the German system of co-determination. Much of the TBWT literature has been produced by governmental or management protagonists, seeking ways to increase national economic performance. Somewhat separately, union-oriented writers have developed critical perspectives based on a combination of scepticism and experience, but the two streams have not been brought into a clear relationship and this is attempted here. Limitations are imposed by the restricted empirical

basis of these literatures, although this is to be expected at this early stage of The management TBWT’s development. of TBWT in The argument is that the German system has driven TBWT. However, the Germany conditions for success, defined in terms of the claims made, are demanding. Difficulties are more significant and problematic than hitherto recognised. They are also related to wider systemic problems. Assessments have tended in 495 this initial stage of development to recognise areas of difficulty without either exploring their significance or placing these in a broader framework. We attempt these tasks in relation to the three key inter-related factors embedded in their analyses: management structure and style in different types of company, the pressures on large companies and the extent and quality of employee representation. We hypothesise that these difficulties are likely to limit the success and the diffusion of TBWT systems. The article is structured as follows: we begin by attempting to define the nature of TBWT and make a broad preliminary estimate of its incidence in the German economy. Its origins in the German economic and regulatory system are briefly touched on. We follow this with an account of the various claims made by advocates, and of the operational difficulties. A broad picture of the conditions for success emerges from this analysis. These problems are then linked to wider debates on manager-employee trust in different types of companies, corporate re-structuring and the current state of co-determination. Finally, conclusions are drawn. Origins and drivers TBWT’s origins reflect the central importance of working time flexibility for German employers over an extended period. Although the development of time flexibility has been an internationally significant phenomenon, time flexibility has specific importance in the German context. TBWT is the culmination of an historic trend away from “standard” or fixed working hours. This started in Germany in the late 1960s with flexitime (Gleitzeit) where working times fluctuated daily around defined core times. More developed recent forms (variable Arbeitszeit) abolish core times and use or combine different forms of working time accounts. They formally increased employee discretion in respect to organising personal working. Working time accounts set limits for accumulating deficit or surplus hours and established periods for levelling accounts. Annual hours systems and lifetime (Lebensarbeitszeit) accounts have spread in recent years. The general tendency has been to decrease core times, and TBWT is thus a rational extension. TBWT is also part of a broader trend towards de-hierarchisation and indirect management of which team-working is a characteristic indicator. These trends played a role in embedding traditions of co-operative management-works council innovation from the 1970s on, and were already identified by Lane as part of the German “high road” to flexibility in the late 1980s (Lane, 1989). High labour and in particular training costs

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emerged as important drivers of the process from the 1970s. In 1984, these factors were supplemented by increased restrictions on the length of the working week. From that year, a 35-hour week was phased into engineering, incorporating options for increased workplace negotiation on flexibility models. This was an antecedent of the subsequent proliferation of “opening clauses” allowing local flexibility in these agreements (Bispinck, 1998). Nevertheless, a dense regulatory framework and “diversified quality production” limits the use of external and contractual flexibility (Streeck, 1997). German competitive advantage is based on value added by highly-skilled employees. The risks are considerable because high labour investment may be “drained” by employee turnover (Wever, 1995). The importance of time flexibility has recently been re-confirmed by German researchers. Collective agreements constrain flexible working generally, leading to high unit capital costs and a low degree of plant utilisation. Overtime constitutes a traditional way of achieving a flexible deployment of labour in Germany. The trade union federation DGB (2002) gives a figure of 1.735 billion paid hours of overtime for 2001 and estimates that about the same amount of hours are not paid for, not recorded or not claimed by employees. Overtime is costly due to overtime premiums, and is subject to works council approval. Avoiding overtime is thus a major driver for experiments with flexible working time arrangements. The DGB’s data show that the rate of overtime hours to the total number of hours worked per year has halved since the 1970s, and flexible schemes have contributed to this trend. Working time is one of only a limited number of topics in which co-determination is mandatory for the employer. This has led to company level alliances between managers and works councils to seek increased flexibility in working time to synchronise working hours and business cycles (Tu¨selmann and Heise, 2000). Thus TBWT has roots in the German regulatory system and co-operative employee relations traditions, and its strengths and weaknesses both encourage and limit its development. To date, the emphasis has been on its strengths.

Claims made for TBWT The claims made for TBWT develop those made for time flexibility more generally. These have frequently been disputed and no attempt is made here fully to reflect this wide-ranging discussion. In brief, it is claimed that benefits may accrue both to employers and employees. Specifically, employers can reduce turnover because employees can achieve improved “work-life balance” (for a brief summary of these arguments see Brewster and Hegewisch, 1994). The success of TBWT may be defined in the same way as for other such systems: it requires a balance of benefits between employer and employee interests that is sufficient to meet these general aims.

Many claims are made for TBWT in particular. An idealised version of these The management is made by Klar (2000) and is presented in Table I. of TBWT in Klar’s claims introduce important aspects of employer aspirations but Germany provide neither a global nor a developed view of claimed advantages. Hoff provides the most useful statement in these respects. Hoff is an expert who has worked with employers, unions and government alike. Wide reference 497 has been made to his work. His Internet page is linked to that of the German Government. The advantages he identifies are as follows. The first is elimination of the considerable direct administrative costs of working time recording. Hoff cites a workplace of 9,000 employees requiring 300 employees to monitor and administer working time. Another is the reduction of overtime, although Hoff places little stress on this point often seized on by practitioners. The second major advantage is that TBWT is an effective tool for starting reorganisation processes. This occurs if and when employees report a requirement for more labour in any given process. The focus of manager-employee discussion in managing change shifts from previous time frame considerations to the actual work processes involved. A third is that attendance is decoupled from work. Precisely why this is an advantage is unclear, but union critics suggest that this means that employers gain access to unpaid labour since employees tend to adopt narrow definitions of what constitutes work (Chronosagentur, 2002; Fergen and Scherbaum, 2001). Further claimed benefits are greater task orientation by employees, and increased scope for them to show intrinsic motivation. Finally, in line with much other literature on the relationship between employment and social change more generally, it is suggested that TBWT is an appropriate reaction to broader societal developments including dissolution of the boundaries between employer and employee (Voß and Pongratz, 1998). Individualisation is reflected in increasing diversity of lifestyles in the face of the declining formative influences of class, church and Traditional

Trust-based systems

Time-oriented working time cultures Too little customer and task orientation

Forward-looking working time systems Working time organised around customer needs and tasks, not vice versa Effective working time paid for Working time planned in advance (e.g. on annual basis) The (detailed) management of working time is the sole responsibility of the team Trust culture and results orientation support time and behaviour management

Working time paid for Work and time planned separately or in rigid fashion Management manages working time (mostly unsuccessfully) Mutual, working time mistrust Source: Adapted from Klar (2000)

Table I. Working time cultures

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family (Beck 1986). It is therefore potentially important for recruitment and retention because it allows account to be taken of these growing differences between individuals (Hoff, 2002). Problems identified As with the claims made for TBWT, so must identification of the problems be situated in discussions of flexible working time more generally. Some contributors to these exchanges have been critical of mutual gains scenarios. Brooks (2000) argues that there is a need to recognise a fundamental ambiguity between organisational requirements for flexibility and employee needs. Recent research found that flexible time schemes significantly increase the probability of employees reporting feelings of time pressure and stress (Fergen and Scherbaum, 2001). In practice, it appears that varying outcomes arise not only from different working schemes, but also from differing personal and domestic situations, underlining the complexity of the problem and arguably the need for sensitive mechanisms to resolve difficulties (Gottlieb et al., 1998; Jarvis, 1999; Walsh, 2000). Researchers have found that employee satisfaction with flexible working hours arrangements can arise but is contingent on employees deriving a sense of control from choosing them (Gottlieb et al., 1998). Hoff identifies six preconditions for realising TBWT’s potential. The first is concerned with management’s capacity to manage work processes. Management must focus on achieving a permanent balance between economic requirements, customer orientation and employee needs. This involves adequate anticipation of tasks and individuals’ capacities to deal with them. The second is trust between different levels of management, workplace employee representatives, and employees. TBWT cannot itself generate, but should rather reflect trust. Third, management must fully embrace the required changes in terms of prioritising its social competences and not fear loss of control. Employees have to subscribe to the organisational aims. To encourage this, trusting behavioural norms have to be established and protected, and managers who do not subscribe to them removed. Hoff places particular emphasis on a fourth point: TBWT only works if a legitimate mechanism exists to deal with work overload situations. Employees reporting work overload are to be encouraged as only this will trigger rationalisation of processes. A mechanism (a committee with works council participation for example) is needed to resolve difficulties. This has its own requirements: employees may feel weak in relation to management, especially where pay is related to performance, and managerial empathy is required. His fifth point is that schemes should be initiated in conjunction with works councils as joint initiatives, not only because of co-determination requirements, but also because of the capacity of works councils negatively to influence the workplace climate. Agreements should specify escape routes via notice periods. Finally, pilot schemes are advocated. If trust does not exist across the organisation, then the process may be started in “islands of trust”.

Haipeter (2001) conducted empirical research in two case study banks and The management used these to develop five “influencing factors”. However, he prefaces his of TBWT in analysis by summarising the attractiveness of the TBWT concept. This lies in Germany synchronising work volumes to order intake or customer flow and identifying organisational weaknesses. Additionally, TBWT potentially “fosters a new leadership culture” and “effectively ties employees to the mission and goals of 499 their companies” (Haipeter, 2001, p. 3). His case studies exhibited low levels of conflict in management-employee relations, team structures allowing for functional flexibility in branches and fluctuating, but relatively predictable customer demand. These apparently constituted a favourable scenario for TBWT. In both cases, although managers did not record working time, employees continued to do so, thereby discharging the employer’s responsibility under German law. In both cases it was left to employees to define what constitutes “real working time”, which are not assumed to equate with times of attendance. Dialogues took place on reducing working time when “excess hours” were reported. These dialogues took completely different forms in the two branches however: in one branch employees felt that the manageress used reports to help them, in the other case employees were feeling they had to justify hours spent and the management used reports to rationalise. Haipeter concludes that although the contexts in the two banks were almost identical, the actual management of the system diverged. In one case, deemed successful, employee and team autonomy increased, as did employee participation, while in the other TBWT effectively lost any meaning as it was integrated into a hierarchical system and simply functioned as a tool to facilitate rationalisation. This meant that although TBWT in a sense worked, it had a de-motivating effect on employees and was therefore unlikely to generate positive economic results in the long-term. While the extent to which employees were interpreting worked hours in favour of the bank could not be quantified with precision, Haipeter found clear indications of this happening. It could not therefore be described as successful. His five major influencing factors are as follows. The first is leadership cultures. The second is the “wage-performance ratio” (by which he seems to mean the wage-effort bargain, in this case the way that individualised performance pay encouraged increased effort). The third is work organisation. The fourth is “the anchoring of internal co-operation relationships” (by which he means the extent to which formal mechanisms of employee representation exist effectively). He contends that only this can limit the impact of misuse of the system purely for rationalisation purposes as in his second case. The fifth and important factor is personnel allocation, i.e. staffing levels, which can easily turn success into failure. A third set of requirements and critical ideas comes from a trade union perspective. These link TBWT to new management strategies to induce employees to internalise discipline. These strategies reduce tendencies for

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employees to seek collective solutions and individualise conflicts on the working time issue. Herrmann and her colleagues, investigating flexible working in manufacturing, argue that an “individualisation” of conflicts over working time is occurring (Herrmann et al., 1999, p. 204). The term is also used by Haipeter (2001, p. 11). As tasks, over which employees have relatively little control, are emphasised, so their concern with time diminishes. Where team work is used, the collectivity can itself be turned against individuals. Peer pressure in teams can emerge, as reported in other contexts (Garrahan and Stewart, 1992). Works councillors, often trade unionists, may attempt to remind employees of time-based norms or of the legal requirement not to work in excess of ten hours per day. However, this tends to alienate employees prioritising task fulfilment from their representatives prioritising a need to limit working time, and thus to diminish the latter’s effectiveness as representatives (Glißmann, 2000; Glißmann and Peters, 2001). The criticism appears consistent with Haipeter’s findings in his hierarchical case. However, Pickshaus (2000) argues that the case of IBM, where works councillors initiated electronic discussion of issues, shows that success is possible in those cases where representatives are capable of raising employee awareness and reducing peer pressure. Here, it appears that representatives reversed or prevented the tendency for employees to internalise company aims. In summary, the conditions for success (in the terms defined by Hoff) collectively specified by these authors are multifarious and demanding. All three viewpoints treated above identify problems originating in management attitudes and behaviours. Hoff emphasises the importance of high-trust relations; Haipeter also describes two different management behaviours, one high and one low-trust, in implementing TBWT, and Glißmann, Peters and Pickshaus locate management initiatives on TBWT in a critical trade union framework. All emphasise, albeit in different senses, the importance of mechanisms for resolving problems. Hoff stresses the importance of overload reporting and mechanisms for dealing with the problem. If employees are not successfully encouraged to report overload, reorganisation processes will not be initiated. Haipeter insists that employee representation at local level is the only guarantee against management “ill-will” in implementing TBWT. Glißmann, Peters and Pickshaus argue that TBWT’s potential problems must be identified as such by employees as a precondition for effective representation. All of this strongly implies that while management behaviours are important, so too are those of workplace employee representatives in influencing outcomes. Recognition of the significance of representational issues exists but remains relatively under-developed in this emergent literature. In neither case is the role of works councils and their links to unions brought out fully, however. Yet it has been contended in the much less highly-regulated US context that the role

of union representatives is critical to the outcome of workplace re-structuring The management (Frost, 2000). It has long been contended that works councillors play a critical of TBWT in mediating role between managers and employees in Germany (Schmidt and Germany Trinczek, 1999). Frost emphasises, inter alia, the importance to representatives’ capacities to influence change of “network embeddedness”, by which she means their links to the extra-workplace union and other networks of support. 501 Schmidt and Trinczek recognise the importance of works council links to trade unions, identifying this as part of the mutually supportive institutional relations within the German system. The problems in context The problems identified with TBWT are not habitually located in wider developments in the German system. Yet such contextualisation is required if the extent of their significance and implications for both present and future are to be fully understood. There are three main relevant and inter-related contexts. The first is that of management structure and style, i.e. different company forms, their distribution in Germany and the types of trust relations that typically exist within them. The second is that of the pressures on and within larger companies where these systems are most prevalent. The third is that of the system of employee representation. We deal with these in turn. Context 1: management structure and style The first context is that of trust in different types of companies, where there is a body of management literature. Hoff, as we showed above, insists that high trust relationships are a precondition of introducing TBWT. How these relationships may be defined, and where they are likely to be found, has been dealt with by other researchers. Trusting attitudes, it has been suggested, reflect three facets. First, trust in another party reflects an expectation or belief that the other party will act “benevolently” (demonstrating concern for the welfare of others). Second, trust involves a willingness to be vulnerable and accept the risk that the other party will not behave in a benevolent way. Third, it involves a level of dependency so that the outcomes for one individual are influenced by the actions of another (Whitener et al., 1998). How far these relationships are to be found varies according to different organisational types, other authors have argued. At one extreme is the “owner-managed entrepreneurial firm” where the owner exerts control by direct supervision over employees and making all decisions. At the other extreme is the “network firm” where organisation members share control, recognise their mutual dependence and pursue common goals. Between the two lie the “vertically integrated functional organisation”, the “diversified divisionalised firm” and the “mixed-matrix firm”. In the first, managers balance the delegation of operating responsibilities to functional specialists with tight guidelines,

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budgets and constraints. In the second, divisions accept controls from the corporate office but operate autonomously in their markets. In the third, stable functional departments are combined with temporary project groups, creating mechanisms to allocate and control resources through joint planning and negotiation. High-control organisations will constrain the development of trustworthy behaviour, the authors add (Creed and Miles, 1996). The incidence of small owner-managed companies in Germany, at the more strongly controlled end of this organisational spectrum, is high. In 1997, over half of German employment was in companies employing less than 100. These companies, and especially those in the service sector, are predicted to be likely to provide a growing share of employment. Employee representation in these companies is relatively weak. (Hilbert et al., 1999). The preconditions for TBWT do not therefore exist for most German employees. If the predictions are correct, then the majority of employees will also be unlikely to participate in TBWT systems in future. Context 2: pressures on and within companies The second context is that of pressures on and within the large companies where TBWT is most common. Recent developments in company reorganisation and re-structuring render Hoff’s requirement constantly to evaluate and adjust targets and work processes in co-operative senses at local level difficult to achieve. Developments in large company strategy in Germany have been described as a combination of operative de-centralisation and strategic re-centralisation. Large organisations have “marketized” internal relations and delegated responsibility for costs and profits to individual (not necessarily small) units. At the same time, the centre has increased its control by defining conditions and strategic (profit) aims that are then communicated to individual units (Sauer and Do¨hl, 1997; Faust et al., 1999) They tend to resemble “vertically integrated functional organisations”. Local management thus find themselves in a situation of increased, centrally monitored competition with limited resources. Haipeter (2002) has suggested that a fundamental contradiction exists between centralised resource allocation and employee participation. Organisational targets are broken down to the levels of the team or even the individual, leaving only very restricted space for the processes Hoff envisages. To establish meaningful participation practices would require a downward shift of resources in direct contradiction of the current trend. The suggestion has been made that downsizing and reduced local resources, far from encouraging the developed social skills required by managers in TBWT may lead to an increase in abusive behaviour among them (Neumann and Baron, 1997). Recent German industrial relations research has also shown the increasing influence of “shareholder value” thinking on management practice. It has been

argued that “shareholder value” is seen in companies as a mediating factor The management between an unstable economic context, company strategy and workplace of TBWT in politics. Elements of participation and employee involvement have recently Germany been reduced in companies influenced by the concept. These companies regarded the required processes as too costly and time-consuming (Do¨rre, 2001). In this sense, a regression has taken place from the more positive 503 long-term developments noted in the mid-1990s (Kotthoff, 1995; Schumann, 1998). Protagonists of high-trust relationships contend, as we have seen, that core elements of trust are reliability and predictability. It has been suggested that participation was previously supported by an ethical foundation of “social partnership”. Management by targets, however, has meant that profit managers have replaced participation managers. It has recently been asserted that this, combined with personal discontinuity caused by practices of management rotation has led to “capitalism without a face” working to the detriment of trust relations (Do¨rre, 2001). Team working, an important and widespread development, may also have important consequences for TBWT, as suggested by trade union critics. Where targets are set at the team level, this can lead to a team focus on targets rather than time worked and a consequent peer pressure to extend working time. The long-term result could be reduced employee satisfaction. Resisting this tendency, a possibility identified by Pickshaus (2000), requires workplace representatives who recognise the problem and are capable of sensitising employees to it. In this area, then, the context contains elements unfavourable for the kind of co-operative problem solving that Hoff requires. This is also the case with the third area. Context 3: effective employee representation The third area requiring contextualisation is effective employee representation within co-determination. Effective workplace representation is essential to make TBWT work. Much evidence, including that adduced by advocates, implies that individuals depend on representation to be assertive in relation to management. This has been underlined in relation to research on the operation of working time accounts in the German finance sector. In two cases, when “overload” problems arose for employees, many individuals reported problems to works councillors. However, all the employees complaining specified that the problem should not be raised as an individual grievance with management since they feared precisely the type of obstruction to their careers and even threats to their job security identified as a dangerous possibility by Hoff. In these cases, the scope for management capacities such as empathy to solve the problem would appear to be minimal or non-existent (Croucher and Singe, 2001). Works councils have been defined as intermediary institutions, legally bound both to represent employees’ interests and work constructively for the

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good of the enterprise. One strand of the discussion on works councils has claimed that they are inherently unstable because they encapsulate two different logics. However, the dominant strand has stressed that it is exactly this mediating function that has lent them stability, has made them a success and led to their recognition as a relatively undisputed cornerstone of the German system of industrial relations (for a summary of these discussions see Mu¨ller-Jentsch (1997)). While the advocates of TBWT mention works councils’ role, there is little critical discussion of the current state of co-determination and the new demands TBWT makes of works councillors. An exception is that union critics have argued that TBWT individualises working time issues and this means councils sign away a central aspect of co-determination. Both the scope and quality of representation are of central importance in relation to TBWT. By the mid-1990s 60.5 per cent of employees in the private sector worked in workplaces without a works council, an increase of more than 10 per cent since 1981 (Hassel, 1999, p. 489, 2002). While works councils remain practically universal in large organisations, this does not mean they are accessible in the workplace as they can exist at the company rather than workplace level. Major challenges to the works council system arise from processes of globalisation, company re-structuring, workforce differentiation, flexibilisation and shifts in employment towards “new” industries with no tradition of workplace representation (Mu¨ller-Jentsch, 2000; Schmidt and Trinczek, 1999). How far works councils can successfully meet these challenges is disputed (Mu¨ller-Jentsch, 1995; Do¨rnen, 1998; Kotthoff, 1998; Schmidt and Trinczek, 1999). Even where councils exist they may not be well positioned to function as an effective representative of employee interests: the Co-Determination Commission (Kommission Mitbestimmung) argued that codetermination can only survive as an element of corporate governance within market capitalism, with institutions functioning to bind employees to the enterprise’s economic well being (Bertelsmann Stiftung and Hans-Bo¨ckler-Stiftung, 1998; for a critique see Martens, 1999). The institutional stability granted by the law has also supported bureaucratisation and the “exclusion of the workforce as relevant actor in workplace politics” (Schmidt and Trinczek, 1999, p. 111). While these arguments may be overly pessimistic, they suggest that the simple existence of workplace representation cannot be assumed sufficient for tackling employee problems resulting from TBWT. These problems, as we have seen, often remain hidden: performance cultures, peer pressure and fears of redundancy all mean that employees tend not to turn to superiors or even councillors to seek remedies (IG Metall, 1999; Glißmann and Peters, 2001). Individual strategies to cope can be found in extending hours, cheating time recording systems or taking work home. Hoff demands empathy from

managers to detect these problems and help employees air them. Works The management councillors, if better placed than managers to achieve this simply by virtue of of TBWT in their formal role, have to work in the same direction. Their capacity to do so Germany depends on their own resources, negatively impacted by overload situations linked to the devolution of bargaining to workplace level, declining numbers of workplace activists integrated into networks of information and reduced union 505 support. A participative and open representative style of representation is a precondition for works councillors being able appropriately to articulate employee needs in relation to TBWT. Yet it appears that faced with a shift of power towards management, works councillors have increasingly adopted business logics. While they have been drawn into co-managing change, their representative competencies, important to influencing TBWT, have been reduced (Kotthoff, 1998; Trinczek, 2000). Meanwhile, unions, experiencing membership decline, have diminished resources to support workplace representatives and assist in developing the “network embeddedness” required by Frost. The new co-determination law of 2001 to some extent seeks to address the problems posed by company reorganisation and the importance of small and medium-sized enterprises. It also attempts to make works councils more representative of employees by providing improved representational opportunities for women. Initial indications are that some success has been registered in these areas (EIRO, 2002; Wassermann, 2002). On the other hand, scepticism has also been expressed as to whether the legal changes are in fact sufficiently fundamental to deal adequately with the problems (Franzen, 2002). In direct relation to discussions on TBWT, ver.di (2002) has demanded an extension of co-determination to include target setting, staffing levels and work volumes in order to ward off increased work intensity. However, there is very little prospect that these demands will be fulfilled in the foreseeable future. Conclusion TBWT has recently grown in large companies operating in Germany as a continuation of a long-running trend to increased time flexibility. Its existence and restricted extent reflect both the potentials and constraints of the German context. Many claims have been made for TBWT’s emancipatory possibilities for employees and the potential for employers. However, whether these claims are realised is contingent on a wide range of factors. These encompass, inter alia, the existence of manager-employee trust, company practices on issues such as work organisation and staffing levels, and management styles encouraging specific employee behaviours. This article has made three central suggestions. First, these conditions are most likely to exist in the larger companies where TBWT has started to emerge. Second, within these companies many trends operate contrary to the required conditions for

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success. These include increasingly centralised control and ideas of “shareholder value”. Third, TBWT requires effective employee representation. The existing literature implies this, but we have developed the implication more fully. The practical conclusion is that such systems should be fostered, especially since the evidence is that employees on occasions appear to specify even to representatives that individual grievances should not be taken up with management. Development of managerial skills is necessary but unlikely to be sufficient. Any trend to managerial scepticism in relation to employee representation is also in a contrary direction to that required. In brief, the general historical conditions that encouraged TBWT’s growth have weakened and are currently balanced by other limiting factors. This is likely to limit the rate of growth of TBWT. Further empirical case study and survey research is required to test these propositions rigorously. One particularly important area for research is: how far employees have in fact internalised company priorities under TBWT, and to what extent they have engaged in individual or collective exchanges with managers on working time issues. References Beck, U. (1986), Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main. Bertelsmann Stiftung and Hans-Bo¨ckler-Stiftung (Eds) (1998), Mitbestimmung und Unternehmenskulturen. Bilanz und Perspektiven. Bericht der Kommission Mitbestimmung, Bertelsmann, Gu¨tersloh. Bispinck, R. (1998), “Der schleichende Umbau des Tarifsystems. Eine empirische Bestandsaufnahme”, in Keller, B. and Seifert, H. (Eds), Deregulierung am Arbeitsmarkt. Eine empirische Zwischenbilanz, VSA, Hamburg, pp. 185-214. Brewster, C. and Hegewisch, A. (1994), Policy and Practice in European HRM, Routledge, London. Brooks, I. (2000), “Nurse retention: moderating the ill-effects of shiftworking”, Human Resource Management Journal, Vol. 10 No. 4, pp. 16-31. Bundesmann-Jansen, J., Groß, H. and Munz, E. (2000), Arbeitszeit 1999. Ergebnisse einer repra¨sentativen Bescha¨ftigtenbefragung zu traditionellen und neuen Arbeitszeitformen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Ministerium fu¨r Arbeit, Soziales und Stadtentwicklung, Kultur und Sport des Landes Nordrhein Westfalen, Ko¨ln. Creed, W.E.D. and Miles, R.E. (1996), “Trust in organizations: a conceptual framework linking organizational forms, managerial philosophies, and the opportunity costs of controls”, in Kramer, R.M. and Tyler, T.R. (Eds), Trust in Organizations: Frontiers of Theory and Research, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 16-38. Chronosagentur (2002), “Arbeiten im Zeitgeist: Die Vertrauensarbeitszeit ha¨lt Einzug in den Unternehmen”, available at: www.chronosagentur.de/inhalt/azeit/vert_arbeit.htm Croucher, R. and Singe, I. (2001), “Works councils and flexible working in German finance”, BUIRA Conference Workshop Papers, Manchester Metropolitan University, 5-7 July. DGB (2002), “Bezahlte U¨berstunden in Deutschland”, available at: www.dgb.de/themen/ Tarifpolitik/bez_ueberstunden Do¨hl, V., Kratzer, N. and Sauer, D. (2000), “Krise der NormalArbeit(s)Politik. Entgrenzung der Arbeit- neue Anforderungen an Betriebspolitik”, WSI-Mitteilungen, Vol. 53 No. 1, pp. 5-17.

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The 35-hour week in France: the French exception? David Alis Institut Gestion de Rennes, University of Rennes, and CREEG UMR CNRS, Rennes, France Keywords France, Work, Time, Regulations Abstract The 1980s and 1990s were periods of far-reaching transformations in working hours and flexibility in Europe. Usually those initiatives came from the social partners. Yet France stood out during this period in that it maintained an interventionist state; the climax of public intervention came when the Aubry laws were passed introducing the 35-hour working week. Paradoxically, the Aubry laws resulted not in a weakening of collective bargaining, but in an unprecedented series of negotiations in companies. This article sets out the process leading to the laws, and then analyses the results of the negotiations.

Personnel Review Vol. 32 No. 4, 2003 pp. 510-525 q MCB UP Limited 0048-3486 DOI 10.1108/00483480310477560

Introduction In the industrialised countries, the 1980s and 1990s were periods of far-reaching transformations in the standards governing working hours and flexibility (Blyton, 1995, Cette and Taddei, 1998). Usually those initiatives came from the social partners. Yet France stood out during this period in that it maintained an interventionist State; the climax of public intervention came when the Aubry laws were passed introducing the 35-hour working week. From a practical point of view, we can point out that the legal weekly working time (the basis in France for overtime calculation) differs from the maximum weekly working time and from the effective collective working time (which is negotiated in each company). Although the legal working week was set at 40 hours in France as early as 1936, the actual number of hours worked was close to 45 hours in the 1950s and 1960s and came to 40 at the end of the 1970s only through branch and company negotiations after 1968. The legal weekly working time is used as a starting point for overtime: the number of overtime hours in France and the overtime rates are thus key elements. Nonetheless, in 1998 the government announced a low quota and a relatively high rate for overtime in order to encourage firms actually to introduce a 35-hour week. In all countries, working time is fixed by a mixture of legal provisions, branch agreements, company agreements, and individual contracts. The French exception is the pre-eminence of the legal level (even if pre-eminent does not mean exclusive). How can we explain this “French exception”? According to Barre`reMaurisson (2001, p. 40): The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on the paper.

. . . this situation can be accounted for in part by the firm initial position of the trade union movement in France around the issue of class war, by the fragmentation and the low rate of union membership, but also by the late recognition of the presence of the unions in the companies [the creation of union branches in companies was only authorized since 1968]. In this triangular match, entered into with difficulty, between the public authorities, management associations and unions, the balance of control swung between a logic of a strong legal framework and a call by the State on the ability of the management and unions to reach negotiated agreements.

A study of the recent period (1993-2000) in the field of legislation concerning working hours enables us to illustrate these swings. In this paper, we would like to underline certain paradoxes stemming from the Aubry laws as they led to the 35-hour week. Paradoxically, however, when the Aubry laws on the 35-hour week were passed in 1998 and 2000, they resulted not in a weakening of collective bargaining, but in an unprecedented series of negotiations in the companies. We will first set out the process leading to the laws, to be followed by the results of the negotiations. New impetus given to a reduction in working hours in the early 1990s The objectives announced for flexibility and reduction on working hours were modified over time. Improvements in working and living conditions were the driving principle in the 1960s and 1970s (Boisard 1996). Since the 1975 recession, the question of working time is linked in the French debate with the question of unemployment. The 1980s saw the end of collective reductions in working hours and an increase in levels of flexibility of working hours to improve levels of competitiveness. A triple transformation was seen in all the industrialised countries (Boulin, 1993): (1) the question of reductions in working hours was replaced by that of flexibility; (2) centralised initiatives were decentralised to company level, or even to that of the establishment; and (3) the employers took the initiative in modifying working patterns. France was no exception, as Barre`re-Maurisson (2001, p. 41) noted: Social dialogue opened up in the early 1980s with the Auroux laws (1982) that introduced the annual obligation to negotiate wage levels and working hours in each company. At that time, the legislators were seeking to adapt companies to economic and social transformations: to do so, they attempted to delegate the regulation of working relations to management and the unions.

The negotiations encouraged the introduction of increased flexibility in working hours (modulation of working hours on a weekly, monthly or annual basis, shift work, etc.) that departed from the traditional weekly periods of work (formerly 39 hours, currently 35 hours). To make such departures

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possible, the legislators passed new laws which accumulated, without any search for coherence, and thus resulted in increasing complexity. The return to a collective, mandatory reduction in working hours came as a surprise in this respect. How can we explain it?

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The influence of active minorities in obtaining a reduction in working hours in order to create jobs From 1991 on, and especially in 1993 – the deepest recession in France since 1945 – there was a marked increase in unemployment. The claim for a job – creating working time reduction The idea of reducing working hours resurfaced, but the objective switched from flexibility to reduction of working hours. Indeed, the prospects of job creation through growth had so far not been very encouraging. The changes in rates of growth in France during recent decades show a slowdown: +5.6 per cent between 1960 and 1969, +3.7 per cent between 1970 and 1979, +2.2 per cent between 1980 and 1989. This tendency did not prevent sudden spurts (average annual growth of 4.1 per cent between 1988 and 1990) and slumps (21 per cent in 1993). The objective was thus “to enrich the content of growth in terms of jobs”. This development was all the more urgent while France was faced with a strong increase in its active population in the 1990s (150,000 to 200,000 more people on the job market each year), and it was expected to continue until about 2005. This explains why, between 1987 and 1990, when the job content of growth was at its highest levels since the Second World War, the French economy created 800,000 jobs, but the number of unemployed fell by less than 300,000. To attain this objective of diminishing unemployment, the 1990s were to see the return of working time reduction (WTR) in two forms: (1) individual reductions (through the development of part-time work); and (2) collective reductions. Substantial reductions in social security contributions for part-time work were passed and continued to be applied between 1992 and 1997. This type of job, which had stagnated in the 1970s and 1980s, showed strong growth from 1992 to 1997. It grew by 1 per cent per year, rising from 12 per cent to 16.9 per cent in 1997. Since then, it has stagnated, which corresponds with the partial phasing out of the reductions in social security contributions. Most of the part-time jobs were created in the service sector requiring only low levels of qualification, and with a high percentage of women. It was often implemented in the mid-1990s by the employers to benefit from reduced social security contributions and provide flexibility to suit production and/or the market, without taking into account the quality of life for the employees concerned. In March 1997, 43 per

cent of the part-time employees would have preferred to work longer hours, as against only 32 per cent in March 1991 (Ministe`re de l’Emploi et de la Solidarite´ and DARES, 1999). At the same time as the development of part-time work increased, renewed pressure was felt in favour of a resumption of the movement for a collective reduction in working hours. The five-year law “concerning work, jobs and vocational training” passed in 1993 thus introduced a series of steps to relax certain legislative aspects, together with financial incentives in the field of flexibility in working hours (Freyssinet, 1997). Over and above these formal negotiations, the media took up the subject from the aspect of the actions of “active minorities” that had a strong influence in the debates. The action of the active minorities In our opinion, it was indeed the action of these minorities that led to the passing of the Robien law, the law that prefigures the Aubry laws on the 35-hour working week. The analysis of the social change brought about by active minorities as set out by the psycho-sociologist Moscovici (1976) was thus given an illustration. These minorities were to be found in various social categories: apart from the unions (and in particular the CFDT that had always attached considerable importance to the principle), economists, consultants, politicians and employers. First of all, in France, we note a development of defensive agreements in 1993 linking reductions in working hours and reduced wages to save jobs (Bloch-Landon et al., 1994). It was also in the autumn of 1993 that Larrouturou, a consultant of Andersen Consulting, set out his project of generalisation of the “four-day week a` la carte” (4 £ 8h) in order to create new jobs and to reduce social security contributions (Larrouturou, 1995). Larrouturou’s ideas were in line with propositions of other economists and management specialists (Charpin and Mairesse, 1978, Confais et al., 1993) to: . reorganisation: opening of the offices and workshops four days out of six, with increased flexibility and responsiveness; and . control of total wage costs by the company with the contribution of the employees and support of the public authorities. The consultant Larrouturou was one of the well-known WTR “lobbyist”. His call for a four-day week seemed to be too mechanistic for most specialists, more concerned with the diversity of the employees and companies needs. His reasoning had mainly pedagogical virtues; if the employees agreed to contribute to WTR, the negotiations could have positive results and provide advantages for all the partners: . The employees, who would “gain” an extra day off per week (the choice of the four-day week as the preferred terms and conditions of WTR was very favourably received by the general public in this respect).

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.

.

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The companies, that would be able to reorganise and acquire new skills, while controlling their overall wage costs. The public authorities, that would “gain” the creation of new jobs and avoid unemployment. The economic meaning of the WTR incentives is an anticipation of the financial impact of job creation on public accounts given back to foster the convergence of collective bargaining (Gubian, 1998).

The various positions contributed to changes in public opinion and the political parties. The three trade union confederations were divided: CFDT was for a job-creating WTR process, CGT was for WTR but without wage moderation and WT annualisation; FO was claiming for more wages rather than for more jobs. Politicians were divided on both the right and left; part of the left was opposed to annualisation and wage moderation, while part of the right was opposed to the principle of collective reductions in working hours as such. In this context, a national inter-professional agreement dated 31 October 1995 and planned for a three-year obligation to negotiate at the level of the various branches, set objectives for the negotiations. However, this negotiation at branch level only produced modest results. From incentives to obligations: the Robien and Aubry laws on the 35-hour week The propositions of the active minorities were “appropriated” by the public authorities and institutions, within the framework of the French republican tradition of a strong, interventionist state. The initiatives of Larrouturou and his close collaboration with de Robien, a member of the French Parliament, contributed to passing a new law known as the “Robien law” on 11 June 1996. The Robien law: an optional system of incentives The objective of the law was to prompt the companies to reduce overall working hours in order to take on more staff (the “offensive” constituent of the law) or preserve jobs (the “defensive” constituent) and obtain exemptions from social security contributions, but the period covered by the state financial support was much longer (seven years) whereas the obligation of maintaining employment covered only two years. After two years of application (from June 1996 to June 1998), 2,953 agreements had been signed between the State and companies, with 631 in the context of the “defensive” aspect of employment and 2,322 in the context of the “offensive” aspect, concerning 279,727 employees in all. The agreements provided for about 20,000 new jobs and avoided 13,000 layoffs (see Doisneau 1998). Negotiations nevertheless appeared about experiments in flexibility and reductions in working hours among a wide range of companies. The experiments brought to light two very important points:

(1) State support, together with a policy of wage moderation, did in fact enable companies to face the economic consequences of WTR. In 45 per cent of the agreements, WTR was accompanied by a wage freeze. (2) In 83 per cent of the cases, the Robien law was also accompanied by reorganisations, as a source of increased competitiveness. According to the economist Coutrot (1999, p. 660): WTR enables reorganisations that are conducive to company responsiveness, reduce lead times, and increase the quality of the products and services. These reorganisations led to reduced costs, in terms of both capital costs (periods of use of equipment and availability of services) and wage costs (reductions in levels of absenteeism, overtime, temporary staff and fixed-term contracts), that went much further than the reductions in social security contributions. In the small and medium-sized firms, they were accompanied by increased rationalisation of work.

The Aubry laws on the 35-hour working week: from incentives to obligations The Robien law had been passed by a rightist government on the basis of a proposition made by a centre-right member of the French parliament, de Robien, although the theme was mainly put forward by the left. When the Left won the legislative elections in 1997, three scenarios were envisaged: (1) continuing to develop part-time work – individualised reductions in working hours (if possible in a form chosen by the employees rather than an imposed form); (2) development of the Robien law (dispositions providing incentives for WTR); and (3) generalised reduction: a reduction in working hours, which would be imposed uniformly on all companies and their staff, whatever the conditions and terms involved, in the same way as the 40-hour working week in 1936 and the 39-hour week in 1982. Scenarios 1 and 2 were not mutually exclusive and could be applied together, as had been the case since 1996. The development of part-time work associated with a drop in social security contributions was beginning to show tangible results at different levels of employment. The threshold at which growth led to job creation seemed henceforth to be close to 1.5 per cent whereas it had stood at over 2 per cent in the 1980s. This change can be explained both by the increase in part-time work and the reduced costs of semi-skilled labour. The CFDT leader, Notat, was for a new law on WTR; nevertheless she was able to accept in a first step a simple legal obligation to negotiate at the company level, as Gandois the CNPF chairman was proposing to the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, and to deal company by company on compensations for job creation (wage moderation and working time modulation). However, at the national tripartite conference on the 10 October 1997, a crucial date, Jospin refused that compromise and announced a new date, 1 January 2000 (2002 for small companies), for legal working time duration.

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Jospin’s preference for scenario 3 can be explained by his will to keep his campaign promises and provide guarantees to the new “plural” majority bringing together the socialist, communist and green parties. To avoid endangering the levels of competitiveness of the companies and the employees’ purchasing power, the government decided to implement scenario 3 (a reduction in the legal weekly working time), with scenario 2, i.e. by recreating an incentive system that replaced the Robien law. In fact the real scenario of the 35 hours has been since 1997, “effective WTR negotiated at the company level, with wage moderation and WT modulation, encouraged by public rules (legal working time to weekly 35 or annual 1600 hours, exemptions conditioned by collective bargaining)”. The law provided for a twin schedule: a reduction in the legal working time to 35 hours per week as from 1 January 2000 for all companies with more than 20 employees, and from 1 January 2002 for all companies with 20 employees and less. The French Civil Service, which was excluded from the field of application, was the object of specific negotiations, which are still in progress (and conflictual in public hospitals). This choice and this political determinism show the persistence of the French system of professional relations giving priority to the State (Rojot, 1997). The Aubry law dated 13 June 1998 was similar to the reductions in working hours decided on in an authoritarian way in the past: the 40-hour week in 1936 and the 39-hour week in 1982. Boisard (1999, p. 173) stated: “Once again, a left-wing government imposed a working time reduction, on a globally hostile management”. The paradox: the laws resulted in a new round of collective bargaining The application of the 35-hour working week within the framework of the Aubry 1 law dated 13 June 1998 was different from the previous laws decided on unilaterally in 1936 and 1982. This law explicitly provided for a basis of negotiations that it encouraged through an incentive system. Moreover, there was not just one law, but two, with the second completing the first, and based on the results of negotiations. An unprecedented situation was thus experimented and concerned the relations between the law and collective bargaining: “the law preceded and activated negotiations that were intended to inspire and inform the elaboration of a second legislative stage” (Boisard, 1999, p. 174). The French legislators thus adopted an original “policy mix” between the Aubry 1 law (dated 13 June 1998) and the Aubry 2 law dated 19 January 2000. In this way, according to Freyssinet (2001, p. 51), the Aubry 1 law constituted a strong incentive for negotiations, using three techniques of public action: [. . .] the law triggered a process of negotiated law. The maximum legal number of working hours was to be reduced to 35 hours at a given date. The government invited industries and companies to negotiate the reduction in advance and decided to take the results of the

negotiations into account when preparing the text of the second law that was to determine the terms and conditions of the first.

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The law widened the field of negotiations and made agreements easier to reach in small firms [. . .] [. . .] the law created a strong stimulus for agreements that, in advance, would reduce working hours by at least 10%. It put pressure on both the timetable (the earlier the agreement, the higher the level of support) and the content (the level of support was increased if the agreement contained certain provisions deemed desirable by the legislators).

A boost to collective bargaining Negotiations had opened at a fast pace by the end of 1998, as Freyssinet (1997, p. 51) reminds us: When the government presented the assessment, just before discussions were to begin in parliament concerning the second law, it was able to mention 100 agreements at industry level covering over ten million employees and 15,000 agreements at company level covering over two million employees. The government was able to exercise indirect control over the negotiations via two mechanisms: agreements covering financial support (granted to the companies signing the agreements after control by the Labour Inspectorate) and approval of the agreements at industry level (this approval – granted by the Ministry of Labour – enabled generalisation of the agreement among all the companies concerned).

We will now present a quantitative assessment of the results before analysing the impact on professional relations. Quantitative assessment: 128,200 agreements on working hours since June 1998 In all, 211 national and regional industry-level agreements had been signed by the end of February 2002, covering more than 13 million employees. A total of 128,200 agreements have been signed in companies since June 1998. They concern 8,791,000 employees. The ministry has drawn up a detailed report on the agreements signed, but the report covers only the agreements signed between 1998 and the end of 2000. We will use this report (Passeron, 2002), together with two summaries (Ministe`re de l’Emploi et de la Solidarite´ and DARES, 1999; Rouilleault and CGP, 2001). At the end of the year 2000, nearly two-and-a-half years after the first Aubry law was passed, the 35-hour working week concerned almost half of the total number of employees, but 62 per cent of the employees in companies with more than 20 employees. The proportion was only 7 per cent in 1998. On the other hand, at the end of 2000, only 8 per cent of staff working in companies of 20 employees and less were covered by the 35-hour week (see Table I). The difference can be explained by the timetable (the reduction in the maximum legal number of working hours for small companies did not come into effect before 1 January 2002). Out of a total of 15.1 million employees potentially concerned in the competitive sectors, about 6.9 million (6.1 million of

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whom were working full time) worked in companies that had already adopted the 35-hour week at the end of 2000 (Passeron, 2002).

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An economic balance made possible by the contributions of three social partners An economic analysis of the Aubry agreements confirms the lessons learned from the Robien law: WTR is financed on the basis of contributions from three partners: the state (via financial support), the companies (via productivity gains linked to reorganisations), and finally the employees (who accepted increased levels of flexibility and wage freezes or small improvements). Financing via state support According to the inquiry carried out by the French Ministry of Labour (Passeron, 2002, p. 2), out of the 6.9 million employees in companies working 35 hours at the end of 2000, over two million employees were working in companies benefiting from the incentive schemes provided for by the first Aubry law. Over 0.7 million were employed in large national companies that were not eligible for the schemes. The other companies, employing more than 3.7 million people at the end of 2000, had not applied for the incentive schemes, because they could not or did not want to undertake to reduce working hours by 10 per cent and create or maintain jobs by at least 6 per cent. Within the framework of the second law, companies whose overall working hours were less than or equal to 35 hours could benefit from a permanent reduction in social security contributions, at rates that dropped as wage levels rose. These reductions granted under the Aubry 1 system, taking into account the actual increases, amounted on average to about 1,300 euros per year and per employee over five years. Reorganisations as a source of productivity gains According to the statistics published by the Ministry, the reorganisation of work was almost systematic. The terms and conditions of work reorganisation varied widely and several terms were often used in the same agreement (see Table II).

Table I. Employees in the private sector and the 35-hour week. Situation at the end of 2000 (in thousands)

Total number of employees concerned Full-time employees Part-time employees Total number of full-time employees working 35 hours

Companies with more than 20 employees

Companies with 20 employees and less

Total

10,550 9,300 1,250

4,550 3,500 1,050

15,100 12,800 2,300

5,800 (62%)

270 (8%)

6,070 (47%)

% Systems based on changes in working hours (modulation, variables hours, etc.) Redeployment of skills (flexibility, specialisation, etc.) Increases in business hours Increases in the periods of use of the equipment (shift work, etc.) Development of certain company functions (sales, R&D, etc.) Readjustment of the staff age pyramid Other terms and conditions (redevelopment of the production sites, changes in management methods, quality control, installation of new equipment, computerisation, development of training schemes, etc.)

47.5 24.4 20.5 16.0 16.0 7.4

13.7

Source: Ministry of Employment and Solidarity. Figures as of 8 March 2000

Annualisation and increase in the periods of use of equipment (industry) and business hours (services) have remained the preferred terms and conditions of flexibility “exchanged” for WTR. Annualisation especially enables reductions in overtime hours and their costs. The annual ceiling is set at 1,600 hours per year, and the weekly ceiling is set at 48 hours. The annualisation of labourcontracts and the extension of company hours clearly manifest that flexibility of the worker is much more at stake than flexibility for the worker. For executives, whose working hours cannot be recorded, a “flat number of days” with a maximum of 217 working days per year has been proposed. Count working time in days and not in hours for experts and managers with a large autonomy to gear their working time is an innovation, which has been recently accepted by the Strasbourg Court of Justice against a request of the French Managers Union CGC. To take a fresh look at work organisations, over 30,000 small and mediumsized companies have had recourse to consulting support co-financed by the state and coordinated by ANACT (the national agency for the improvement of working conditions). Companies have widely made use of the support provided by consultants to implement changes in work organisation and thus obtained productivity gains. Modifications in the methods used to calculate working hours The reduction in weekly working hours is also based, not on “real” changes in work organisation, but on “virtual” changes linked to the methods used to calculate working hours. According to the economist Coutrot (1999, p. 662), for a majority of employees, the switch to 35 hours is made on the one hand through a simple manipulation of the way the working hours are calculated, and on the other hand, through new intensification of their work, which is only poorly compensated for by rest days which are fixed by the company to suit its requirements. Brunhes et al. (2001, p. 58) explains the phenomenon: for the

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Table II. The terms and conditions of work reorganisation

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employers, the objective was to move closer to 35 hours of actual work. The definition of actual working hours has been reformulated within the framework of the Aubry laws: “the time during which the employee is at the disposition of the employer and must comply with his directives without being able to freely pursue his or her own personal occupations”. Company managers have thus examined the time given over to breaks, recalculated time spent on standby, and taken into account the rest days or days off that have been added over time to the legal periods of paid holiday leave. The result: “large numbers of employees who thought they were working 39 hours per week on average, find that they were much closer to 35 hours” (Brunhes et al. (2001), p. 58). The importance of wage moderation State support, reorganisations and changes in calculation methods are necessary elements, but they were not enough to amortise the cost of the 35-hour week and the new staff taken on. Wage moderation is thus essential. According to Doisneau (2000), 65 per cent of the employees concerned by the agreements benefit full wages but have to accept temporary moderation in the form of smaller wage improvements or wage freezes. These freezes or moderate increases have been scheduled for a period of two or three years on average, and the savings amount to about 1 per cent. According to the economist responsible for the latest inquiry carried out by the Ministry of Labour (Passeron, 2002), “in 2000, a historic year in terms of job creation (+568,000 jobs, including 534,000 employees in competitive sectors other than agriculture), the reduction in working hours apparently contributed to creating about 30% of the new jobs”. The studies of Ministry of Labour and of the CGP give 240,000 WTR job creations at the end of 2,000 and 300,000 at the end of 2001. However, it is a short-term effect: These creations will only give rise to long-term jobs if the resulting productivity gains and the reduced social security contributions continue to be accompanied by a drop in wages as compared with a situation without reductions in working hours; these three components will enable the costs of the switch to the 35-hour working week to be counterbalanced (Passeron, 2002).

The long-term effect will also be higher if the process involves more small companies but lower due to the decisions of the new government to end the process (the exemptions are no longer linked with WTR) and the higher minimum wage. The Aubry laws have thus brought about a far-reaching transformation in company operating methods and results. They have also brought about a change in professional relations. Innovations in the field of industrial relations The law has systematically encouraged collective bargaining, bringing company managers to seek agreement with the unions. Thus VergnolleChanransonnet (2000, p. 31) observed that:

The law systematically gives priority in its 37 articles to the channels of collective bargaining at the level of particular activities, companies or establishments. The benefits of flexibility, facilities and innovations in the mode of organisation of working hours and a fortiori the reductions in social security contributions, depend on the conclusion of a collective agreement. Without a negotiated agreement, it is not possible to:

– have recourse to modulation of working hours, or arrange a set numbers of days for executives; – allocate to a time savings account a fraction of the hours worked over and above the collective legal weekly working time; – have recourse to the terms and conditions provided for overtime, extra time off for extra hours worked, or the organisation of part-time work.

Only companies wishing to adopt the 35-hour working week without adjusting working hours and without any state support are exempted from negotiations. But they are only able to use the provisions relative to working hours as provided for in their collective agreement, without modifying the provisions, and on the condition that they are directly applicable. Recourse to mandates and referendum The necessity of negotiating poses the double problem of the existence and the representatives of the union. France is set apart by the low rate of union membership (especially in small and medium-sized companies) and their low level of representativeness. Unions have been authorised late by the WaldeckRousseau law (1884). Union branches were not authorised in companies until 1968, and the annual obligation of negotiating in the companies (passed in 1982) did not result in any large-scale development in negotiations. To compensate for these shortcomings and encourage negotiations, the law has thus introduced two innovations: mandates and referendum. To enable small companies without union representatives to benefit from the supports, the system of mandates was developed from 1996 on (at the time of the Robien law). The union organisations that are representative at a national level can mandate ordinary employees to negotiate and sign agreements on working hours. By conditioning the allotment of the supports to the signature of an agreement with the union representatives or employees with mandates, it is possible to develop a social dialogue as the presence of unions in small and medium-sized companies. The practice of mandates has developed. A study carried out concerning the 26,600 agreements signed as at 8 March 2000 showed that 40 per cent of the agreements had been signed by an employee with a mandate. These figures, which show the importance of mandates in small and medium-sized companies, underline nevertheless the difficulties of negotiations with the union branches where they exist. The reluctance of certain union branches to negotiate “fair exchange” agreements (and not agreements demanding “more and more”) are thus made clear. The annualisation of

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working hours and wage moderation (compensation that is often necessary for an agreement involving reductions in working hours with corresponding new jobs) are not yet the object of social and union consensus. Taking into account the reluctance shown by the unions, numerous company managers have given pride of place to referendums to prepare the signature of a company agreement. Even if the referendum has no legal value, it enables the employees to show their support for a project to reduce and adjust working hours. Quite a number of negotiations for agreements in companies under the Robien and Aubry 1 laws have used the process to obtain approval for “fair exchange” agreements by the employees. In this way, in April 1999, CGT and CFDT, the majority union organisations, arranged for a referendum to be held in the French railway company SNCF, with the support of the management, to obtain staff approval for the planned Aubry agreement that they were about to sign (result: 61 per cent of “yes” votes). The Aubry 2 law made this recourse to a referendum systematic: the signature of a company agreement with a “minority” union is not sufficient to enable the company to benefit from state support in the form of reduced social security contributions: it is also necessary to organise a referendum whose result is favourable to the project. CFDT, a minority union in the Michelin group, was thus obliged to “campaign” alongside the management in favour of a draft agreement to reduce working hours within the framework of a company referendum. Although the result of the referendum was positive, it gave rise to tension and CFDT’s position was initially weakened. A “statist” flexibility What assessment can we make of the evolution in French relations? The Aubry laws, like the Roman god Janus, present – at least – two faces (Freyssinet, 2001, p. 54). On the one hand, these laws can be interpreted as an imperious state intervention, a return to centralising, interventionist logic at the expense of the autonomy of the social partners. The state remains the final arbitrator. Statutory regulation is still the key element governing the use of employment conditions and the introduction of new working time patterns. On the other hand, the law has considerably increased the room to manoeuvre for negotiators and the advantages they can gain through negotiations. The new legislation has encouraged the social partners to search agreements on the flexible implementation of reduced working time. As a result, negotiations concerning working hours at industry and company levels have shown a remarkable growth. Over and above the increasing frequency of mandates and referendums, we find major changes in three domains (Brunhes et al., 2001, p. 71): The law has introduced agreement and negotiations into themes from which they were absent, concerning work organissation and working hours in particular, a domain that was

considered as being the exclusive responsibility of the management.” The 35 hours agreements were new ones mainly because they were global ones involving (WT organisation, wages, employment, work organisation) in a perspective of one to three years. It has led staff representatives to debate and negotiate on the conditions of individualisation of working conditions and no longer only on collective working hours. At times, it has brought to the negotiating table management and labour who were not used to talking to each other.

The social dialogue has thus seen a certain degree of renewal, even if, according to the expression used by Freyssinet (2001), it has been put “on drip feed”, and even if we can dispute the “spontaneity” of the movement: the employers have to go through a collective agreement stage to use the margins of freedom provided by the law and benefit from state support. While the state remains the main architect of the change in the light of the discord between French trade unions, as well as between trade unions and employers organisations, Anxo and O’Reilly (2000) call this process of the creation of new working time patterns “statist flexibility”. In this way, as Boulin (2001, p. 122) noted , we cannot speak of negotiated laws, unlike the two Dutch laws of 1996 and 2000 on working hours (which were the object either of prior inter-professional agreement, or of intense discussions within the Foundation of Labour), or again European directives on parental leave, part-time work or fixed-term contracts (that are the result of agreements between European management and labour partners under the provisions of the social protocol attached to the treaty of Maastricht). On the future of the French industrial relations system (law and colllective bargaining, majority agreements), we must point out the new national interprofesionnal agreement of July 2001, which is the basis of Fillon Chantier (new Labour Minister) in the beginning of 2003: [. . .] more contract and agreements between social partners, less law (Barreau, 2003).

Conclusion This initial analysis shows the importance of giving priority to contextualised approaches and putting things into perspective, and thus avoiding the ideological and rhetorical bias (Hirschman, 1991, 1995) that obscure the debate on work. Besides the analysis of the consequences on professional relations, several lines of research must be followed. The economic incidence of flexibility and WTR should be studied. The far-reaching nature of reorganisation to ensure maintaining and development of company competitiveness should be underlined in particular (Alis, 2001). The consequences of the 35-hour week on working conditions and ways of life should also be better understood. In this respect, Meda (2001) has shed light on the contribution of the reduction in working hours to a new distribution of social and family roles and to a reduction in the importance of work in society and not just in the time thus spent. Other researchers, for their part, underline

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the risks of deterioration in working conditions linked to the generalisation of the 35-hour week. Askenazy (2000) shows how, in their efforts to bring together the 35-hour week, reengineering and lean production, companies run the risk of worsening working conditions, adding to workloads and increasing the risks of accidents and occupational illnesses. We are still too close to the latest events to be able to verify the consequences of flexibility and working time reduction policies on working conditions and ways of life. In all events, these consequences are likely to be sharply contrasted (Gavini, 2001). The division of tasks, the uncertainties concerning working hours, and the definition of periods of notice, work rhythms and workloads are aspects that still have to be monitored at company level. Finally, an international perspective is necessary to enrich the current debate about industrial relations and WTR in France and Europe (Boulin et al., 1993; Anxo and O’Reilly, 2000; O’Reilly et al., 2000; Blair et al., 2001). References Alis, D. (2001), Re´duire et Ame´nager le Temps de Travail. Pourquoi? Comment?, Editions l’Harmattan, Paris. Anxo, D. and O’Reilly, J. (2000), “Working time regimes and transitions in comparative perspective”, in O’Reilly, J., Cebrian, I. and Lallement, M. (Eds), Working Time Changes: Social Integration through Transitional Labour Markets, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Askenazy, P. (2000), “Re´duction du temps de travail: organisation et conditions de travail”, Revue Economique, Vol. 51 No. 3. Barreau, J. (2003), Quelle De´mocratie Sociale dans le Monde du Travail ?, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes. Barre`re-Maurisson, A.M. (2001), “Partage des temps et des taˆches me´nage`res dans les me´nages”, Cahier Travail et Emploi, La Documentation Franc¸aise, Paris. Blair, A., Karsten, L. and Leopold, J. (2001), “The European Working Time Directive and its effect on flexibility within organisations: a British-Dutch comparative analysis”, in Morello, G., Adams, B. and Sabelis, I (Eds), Time and Management, ISIDA, Palermo. Bloch-Landon, C., Boisard, P., Boulin, J.Y. and Coutrot, T. (1994), “Les processus locaux de partage du travail”, Travail et Emploi No. 59. Blyton, P. (1995), Changes in Working Time: An International Review, St Martin Press, New York, NY. Boisard, P. (1996), L’Ame´nagement du Temps de Travail Que sais-je, PUF, Paris. Boisard, P. (1999), “L’ame´nagement du temps de travail, une nouvelle ne´gociation a` inventer”, in Chanteau, J.P. and Clerc, D. (Eds), Re´duction du Temps de Travail: Que Faut-il Croire?, Editions Syros, Paris. Boulin, J.Y. (1993), “Les politiques du temps de travail en France: la perte du sens”, in Boulin, J.Y., Cette, G. and Taddei, D. (Eds), Le Temps de Travail, Editions Syros, Paris. Boulin, J.Y. (2001), “Le poids des enjeux sur les modalite´s de re´gulation du temps de travail”, in Groux, G. (Ed.), L’Action Publique Ne´gocie´e. Approches a` Partir des 35 Heures – FranceEurope, Editions l’Harmattan, Paris. Boulin, J.Y., Cette, G. and Taddei, D. (1993), Le Temps de Travail, Editions Syros, Paris.

Brunhes, B., Clerc, D., Meda, D. and Perret, B. (2001), 35 Heures: Le Temps du Bilan, Editions Descle´e de Brouwer, Paris. Cette, G. and Taddei, D. (1998), Re´duire la Dure´e du Travail: Les 35 Heures, Le Livre de Poche – Re´fe´rences, Paris. Charpin, J.M. and Mairesse, J. (1978), “Re´duction de la dure´e du travail et choˆmage”, Revue E´conomique, No. 1. Confais, E., Cornilleau, G., Gubian, A., Lerais, F. and Sterdyniak, H. (1993), “1993-1998: veut-on re´duire le choˆmage?”, La Lettre de l’OFCE, No. 112. Coutrot, T. (1999), “35 heures, marche´s transitionnels, droits de tirage sociaux. Du mauvais usage des bonnes ide´es. . .”, Droit Social, No. 7/8. Doisneau, L. (1998), “Deux anne´es d’application du dispositif d’incitation a` la re´duction collective du temps de travail – loi Robien”, Documents DARES, No. 23. Doisneau, L. (2000), “Les conventions de re´duction du temps de travail de 1998 a` 2000: embaucher, maintenir les re´mune´rations, se re´organiser”, Premie`res Synthe`ses, No. 45-2. Freyssinet, J. (1997), Le Temps de Travail en Miettes, Editions de l’Atelier, Paris. Freyssinet, J. (2001), “Politiques publiques et ne´gociations collectives sur la dure´e du travail: la co-production de normes”, in Groux, G. (Ed.), L’Action Publique Ne´gocie´e. Approches a` Partir des 35 Heures – France-Europe, Editions l’Harmattan, Paris. Gavini, C. (2001), La Me´tamorphose du Travail: Gagnants et Perdants des 35 Heures, Editions Liaisons, Paris. Gubian, A. (1998), “Les 35 heures et l’emploi: la loi Aubry de juin 1998”, Regards sur l’Actualite´, No. 245. Hirschman, A.O. (1991), The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, Harvard University Press, Boston, MA. Hirschman, A.O. (1995), “The rhetoric of reaction: two years after”, in, A Propensity to Self-subversion, Harvard University Press, Boston, MA. Larrouturou, P. (1995), Du Temps pour Vivre: La Semaine de Quatre Jours a` la Carte, Flammarion, Paris. Meda, D. (2001), Le Temps des Femmes: Pour un Nouveau Partage des Roˆles, Flammarion, Paris. Ministe`re de l’Emploi et de la Solidarite´ and DARES (1999), La Re´duction du Temps de Travail: Les Enseignements des Accords [E´te´ 1998-E´te´ 1999], La Documentation Franc¸aise, Paris.. Moscovici, S. (1976), Social Influence and Social Change, Academic Press, London. O’Reilly, J., Cebrian, I. and Lallement, M. (2000), Working time Changes: Social Integration through Transitional Labour Markets, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Passeron, V. (2002), “35 heures: 3 ans de mise en œuvre du dispositif Aubry 1”, Premie`res Synthe`ses, No. 06-2. Rojot, J. (1997), “Relations industrielles”, in Simon, Y. and Joffre, P. (Eds), Encyclope´die de Gestion, Economica, Paris. Rouilleault, H. and Commissariat Ge´ne´ral du Plan (CGP) (2001), Re´duction du Temps de Travail: Les Enseignements de l’Observation, La Documentation Franc¸aise, Paris. Vergnolle-Charansonnet, C. (2000), “De la ne´gociation a` l’accord d’entreprise”, Revue Franc¸aise de Comptabilite´, No. 320.

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Book review Trends in Organizational Behavior Vol 8: Employee versus Owner Issues in Organizations Edited by Cary L. Cooper and Denise M. Rousseau Wiley 2001 ISBN 0-471-49854-8 £18.99 145 pp. Review DOI 10.1108/00483480310477579 This title is somewhat misleading, because this volume in the series on trends in organisational behaviour does not really look at “employee versus owner issues”. Instead it addresses a somewhat narrower question – something like, “What are the organisational consequences of employee involvement?” Indeed the seven chapters here are even more focused, since they only consider financial involvement and ownership. As the back cover suggests, this volume does explore, “whether employees should be stakeholders in their businesses”. However, it does not quite get as far as, “the relationship between employees and owners in general” (also on the back cover). Nonetheless, as one would expect from such an illustrious editorial pairing as Cooper and Rousseau, each chapter would repay careful reading and certainly be useful for students, academics and practitioners with an interest in reward systems and financial ownership. I shall sketch each chapter in turn, before trying to say what I think this book’s good points are, and what it is lacking.

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“Employee equity: employee versus owner issues in organizational behavior”, Joseph R. Blasi and Douglas L. Kruse This introductory chapter offers an overview of various forms of stock and share plans, together with a discussion of empirical evidence largely drawn from studies in the USA. The highlight of this chapter was its concluding research agenda, which threw up some interesting questions in this field (p. 13): for example, “To what extent does the success of employee equity programs depend on the role that they play in a comprehensive programme of strategic human resource management” and “are economic [or corporate culture] considerations mainly driving the employee Equity phenomenon”. An undeveloped, but nicely phrased point was the need for “econometric shenanigans” to enable meta-analytic studies of employee ownership (p. 8). It would have been interesting to have had more detail on how meta-analysis might be carried out in studying the link between ownership and firm

performance since this issue involves studying conflicting empirical data, and is causally complex. “When employers share ownership with workers”, Zipi Shperling and Denise M. Rousseau This chapter followed nicely on from Blasi and Kruse. It offered a well-framed discussion of various forms of capital, as well as a useful analysis of different motivations with organisations to share ownership (to recruit valued workers, to retain them, to motivate them to contribute both individually and collectively, to build community and enhance identification with the firm, to respond to radical change in the economic context). This chapter also had some interesting cases, which could spice up a lecture on this topic. One thing I found problematic was the presentation of participative approaches to management (such as codetermination in Germany) as barriers to worker-ownership arrangements. These are portrayed, as having, “reified the roles of owner and worker, making it culturally difficult for workers to think of themselves as owners” (p. 37). What this overlooks is that such arrangements may protect peripheral workers, whom organisations may not be as desperate to recruit and retain. This criticism could be levelled at other chapters which occasionally seem to focus exclusively on high-fliers. “The psychological consequences of employee ownership: on the role of risk, reward, identity and personality”, Paul R. Sparrow This chapter does not really talk at length about the psychological consequences of employee ownership, although there is an interesting discussion of Cappelli’s (1999) imaging inertia theory as an alternative to a rational cost benefit model for understanding decisions about ownership. In the space of just ten pages, Sparrow raises a quite astonishing number of questions which could prompt further investigation. The main contribution of this chapter is in raising two principles which should influence analysis of wider employee ownership. First, it is necessary to consider that ownership comes in many different forms and in different degrees, and it is likely that some forms of ownership will not influence behaviour. Second, it is important to recognise that employee ownership is not always beneficial, given that it involves risk. “When employees become owners: can employee loyalty be bought?”, Marc Orlitzky and Sara L. Rynes This title perhaps begs one or two ethical questions, and has a definite managerialist ring to it that is in keeping with much of the book. Even so, Orlitzky and Rynes do provide a good summary of the literature on risk and agency theory as it relates to the potential disadvantages (for employees) of stock ownership (pp. 61-2). The remainder of their chapter considers three models relating to: the psychological dimensions of employment ownership (Pierce et al., 1991); contextual factors influencing the link between ownership

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and employee loyalty (new to this chapter, summarising the literature and empirical evidence); the effects of employee ownership on performance (also new to this chapter, a decision tree/path model relating cognitions to motivation and performance). These models are likely to provide an excellent basis for theorising, or developing empirical studies. They may also be useful in thinking about implementing ownership initiatives. “Achieving a sense of ownership among employees: a critical look at the role of reward systems”, Annette Cox This title again begs ethical questions, since creating a sense of something is potentially independent of any substantive quality. The gap between sense and substance is intentionally created and exploited by many. Setting aside the ethical and power considerations that a focus on “sense” throws up, there are some methodological issues that would perhaps have been worth exploring to supplement Cox’s useful guidance for future research. Since perceived ownership is a recurrent theme in this literature, it would have been helpful to have heard the case for more direct measures. Having started with the goal of achieving a sense of ownership, Cox’s heartening (for the democratically minded) conclusions almost read like an apology, “. . . it is increasingly commonly accepted that in order to persuade employees to behave like owners, financial participation schemes alone are insufficient, but must be accompanied by mechanisms through which to influence decision-making power” (p. 90). Cox offers some useful advice for organisations trying to foster “feelings of employee ownership” (pp. 90-2) and this chapter, in keeping with the rest of the book offers a helpful overview of the literature, which will be of particular use to those operating in a UK context. “Bringing open-book management into the academic line of sight: sharing the firm’s financial information with workers”, Claudia J. Ferante and Denise M. Rousseau This chapter was the most interesting one for me, and also came closest to discussing the “relationship between employees and owners in general”. It continued the debate on perceived ownership, but incorporated discussion of appraisal, high involvement, change, employee development and empowerment. This range of themes would have been bewildering, or incoherent were it not for the organised focus on open book management. Ferante and Rousseau offer a well-rounded analysis of a potentially exciting field for future research. The chapter is well structured, and their model on the dissemination of financial information usefully summarises concepts from organisational behaviour (power, influence, performance, motivation), themes on distribution of information (understandable, timely etc) tips for implementation and key performance metrics. I would say this is essential reading for those interested in disseminating financial information within organisations, or researching financial involvement, or empowerment.

“Employee stock transfers in SMEs: understanding an infrequent event”, Jerome A. Katz and Pamela M. Williams This is a lively chapter with which to finish the book. It is also the first paper I ha;ve read whose list of references begins with a Web link to Christina Aguilera’s song lyrics. (Just for the reader, it is reproduced at the top of my brief list of references, see Aguilera, 1999.) Following this link offers her take on transferring ownership, “‘ [I]f you love something, let it go; if it comes back its yours; that’s how you know. It’s for keeps, oh yeah, it is for sure and you’re ready and willing to give me more.” (p. 119 [from What A Girl Wants (Aguilera, 1999)]). Katz and Williams have a bold, engaging style of writing in part evinced by their courageous referencing. In addition to other lively snippets they offer a comprehensive, scholarly review of the empirical evidence on stock transfer within the USA, concluding with a thought-provoking model of the relationship between wealth and independence orientations in small business owners. They portray these rival orientations as “gravitational partners”. This model is put to good use to illustrate the relationship between individual motivations for stock transfer and structural constraints or incentives. Overview This is a really useful book, and it does offer “A quick, insightful and authoritative window on the latest in OB” (back cover). Each chapter offers a well crafted analysis, covering the relevant literature, and outlines and skilfully synthesises relevant empirical research, then proposing a well formulated list of research questions. My personal preference would be to see volumes such as these: that address one topic in-depth, and are intended to help students, academics and practitioners; include one or two chapters that do not fit this format. These could report on or discuss the potential use of different modes of inquiry (case study, discursive analysis, multi-method), or present different and overtly political stances (critical theorist, Marxist, free marketeer). This would potentially require a lot of work from an editorial team, in encouraging a diverse range of authors, then introducing and selecting such a mix, but to rub up against and engage opposing viewpoints is essential in developing one’s own ideas. Presenting a united front for the study of financial ownership (largescale surveys, economic data), implies one way of carrying out such research. This has its advantages in terms of growing a field of inquiry (Pfeffer, 1993). I am not confident that this uniform style encourages sufficiently rounded, complex or in-depth understanding of this, or any organisational phenomenon (Van Maanen, 1995). Relying on any one way of understanding limits our capability to make sense of these issues in day-to-day organisational life, which is beset with contradiction, contest and rhetoric. References Aguilera, C. (1999), What A Girl Wants, available at: http://gurlpages.com/christina_a_fan/lyrics. html (accessed 14 February 2003)

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Cappelli, P. (1999), The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market Driven Workforce, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. Pfeffer, J. (1993), “Barriers to the advance of organizational science: paradigm development as a dependent variable”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 18 No. 4, pp. 599-620. Pierce, J.L., Rubenfeld, S.A. and Morgan, S. (1991), “Employee ownership: a conceptual model of process and effects”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 16, pp. 121-44. Van Maanen, J. (1995), “Style as theory”, Organization Science, Vol. 6 No. 1, pp. 133-43.

Kevin M. Morrell Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK, URL: www.kevinmorell.org.uk

The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0048-3486.htm

About the authors David Alis David Alis is Professor of Management in the Institute of Management at the University of Rennes. He is President of the IGR Scientific Council and author of a number of books on human resource management. His particular research interests are working time flexibility, work/family conflict and organizational performance. E-mail: [email protected]

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Richard Croucher Richard Croucher is Senior Research Fellow in the HR Research Centre, Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University. His interests include comparative and historical approaches to industrial relations and he is a regular contributor to scholarly journals in these fields. He directs a Leverhulme Trust-funded research collaboration with the Sozialforschungstelle, Dortmund, on international trade union co-operation in Europe. E-mail: [email protected] Anneke van Doorne-Huiskes Anneke van Doorne-Huiskes is a Professor of Sociology at Utrecht University. Her thesis considered labour market participation of higher educated women. Earlier she was a Professor at Wageningen Agricultural University and at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Since 1987 she has also worked as an Independent Consultant for her own consultancy-agency. Currently she presides on the board of governors of MAGW, the social sciences brand of The Netherlands Orgnisation for Scientific Research (NWO). E-mail: [email protected] Lynette Harris Lynette Harris is Associate Head of the Department of HRM and Professor of HR and Professional Practice at the Nottingham Trent University’s Business School. Prior to joining the University in 1988, Lynette was a Personnel Director and has worked as personnel practitioner in both the public and private sector. She acts as an independent arbitrator and mediator for ACAS, a Deputy Chair of the Central Arbitration Committee and as a consultant to a range of UK organisations. Lynette is an active researcher on contemporary issues in human resource management and the author of texts and articles in both the academic and practitioner literature. E-mail: [email protected] Luchien Karsten Luchien Karsten is Professor in the Foundations of Management Thinking, Faculty of Management and Organisation, University of Groningen. Having been trained as an economist and philosopher, his research interests in time

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were developed through his doctoral thesis on the eight-hour day. Subsequent research has focused on the actual development of time-space orientation in organisations. Additionally, he is interested in management concepts that are used to describe and analyse time and space in organisations. He is a member of the editorial board of a Dutch journal on management and philosophy. E-mail: [email protected] John Leopold John Leopold is Associate Dean of Nottingham Business School and Professor and Head of Department of Human Resource Management. His research interest in time and management was stimulated through long standing collaboration with Luchien Karsten. Other research interests include comparative study of managing the employment relationship on greenfield sites, public sector modernisation and employee relations in the NHS and trade unions and the Labour Party. E-mail: [email protected] Gill Musson Gill Musson comes from a Communication Studies/Organizational Psychology background and she is currently a Lecturer in OB/HRM at Sheffield University Management School. Her broad research area is change management, and her work has ranged from researching manufacturing regeneration strategies, national initiatives for changing clinical behaviour in line with research evidence, to her current project on how people “manage” in virtual working environments. Gill’s methodological focus is on language, and the role it plays in structuring reality(ies). E-mail: [email protected] Chantal Remery Chantal Remery currently works as a researcher at Utrecht School of Economics. Her field of research is labour market issues, especially gender inequality, organisation of work and working times, personnel policies and ageing. Her recent publications include articles on work family policies, flexibility and ageing in organisations. E-mail: [email protected] Bastiaan W. Rosendaal Bastiaan W. Rosendaal is Associate Professor at the Free University in Amsterdam, Department of Public Administration and Communication Science. His major fields of interest are organisational learning and knowledge development. Prior to this he worked at The University of Amsterdam in the Department of Adult Education and the Department of Organisational Sociology. In addition to his academic career he worked for 13 years as an independent researcher and consultant in the field of human resources development and knowledge support. E-mail: BW.Rosendaal@scw. vu.nl

Joop Schippers Joop Schippers is a Professor of Labour Economics and the Economics of Equal Opportunity at Utrecht University. He has published on a series of topics with respect to male-female labour market differences, human capital, work-family arrangements, labour market flexibility, organisational behaviour, life courses and older workers. Since 2000 he has also served as a Scientific Director of the National Institute for Labour Studies (OSA) in Tilburg. E-mail: [email protected] Ingo Singe Ingo Singe is a Graduate of Hamburg University, Germany and has studied sociology and social and economic history. He has worked in market research and researched the impact of flexible working on systems of employee representation in Germany and the UK for Cranfield University, UK. He is currently investigating trade union strategies for recruiting white collar workers. He is interested in non-standard working practices and processes of interest formulation as well as comparative research. He is particularly interested in the use of qualitative methodology in these fields. E-mail: [email protected] Susanne Tietze Susanne Tietze works as a Senior Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour and Comparative Management at Nottingham Business School, The Nottingham Trent University. She is particularly interested in understanding discursive processes in organisational context and in how meaning is achieved in contested organisational arenas. Recently, she has concluded two empirical studies on “working from home”, in which she developed a particular focus on temporal conceptions in home-based telework. E-mail: [email protected] Acknowledgement of Reviewers The Guest Editors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the following reviewers: Dr Emma Bell, Industrial Relations and Organisational Behaviour Group, University of Warwick. Dr Margo. L.M. Brouns, Centre of Gender Studies, University of Groningen. Dr Arie C. Glebbeek, Department of Sociology, University of Groningen. Dr Marijke Krabbenbos, Internal Consultant, Postbank, Amsterdam. Professor Henri Rouilleault, Director General, ANACT Lyon. Dr Ida Sabelis, Free University of Amsterdam. Dr Alan Tuckman, Nottingham Business School. Dr Maarten van Riemsdyk, Twente University. Dr Kees van Veen, Faculty of Management and Organisation, University of Groningen. Dr Michael Whittall, Nottingham Business School.

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Call for papers Special Issue of Personnel Review on

Temporary work/temporary workers and HRM During the 1990s temporary agency work was the most rapidly growing form of atypical employment in the European Union. It doubled in most member states whereas in Denmark, Spain, Italy and Sweden numbers increased five-fold. In the USA the temporary workforce is estimated to be 3 per cent of the total workforce, while in Australia it is estimated to be 2.1 per cent – equivalent to the UK. In all countries it is expected that temporary agency work arrangements will expand rapidly over the coming decade. The driving force for the increase in temporary workers has been the demand from user firms and the capability of temporary work agencies (TWAs) to provide it. One of the most frequently cited reasons for this growth in temporary working has been the labour flexibility provided to user firms. Thus, TWAs become purveyors of flexibility and HR ‘‘brokers’’ undertaking the HR roles that were previously conducted ‘‘in-house’’ such as recruitment and selection, payroll, appraisal and training. Articles are invited which address the nexus between temporary work/temporary workers and HR. Articles may focus on national/ international perspectives or from the perspective of the temporary worker, temporary work agency or the user firm. Possible topics might include: .

Rationale for the growth of temporary working.

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Regulation of temporary work.

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Responsibilities of temporary workers, temporary work agencies and user firms.

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Temporary work as a growing multinational industry.

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Temporary work as a challenge to conventional notions of the internal labour market, worker-firm attachment, and training/ career paths.

Enquiries, expressions of interest and submission of abstracts (500 words maximum) should be directed to Julia Connell or John Burgess at the address below. Abstracts should arrive by the end of August 2003. Complete articles of between 5,000 and 8,000 words should be submitted in triplicate by the end of December 2003 at the latest for review. Articles will be blind reviewed. The issue will be published in 2004.

Guest Editors: Julia Connell and John Burgess Faculty of Business and Law, University of Newcastle, University Drive, Newcastle, NSW, 2038, Australia. Tel: 61 2 49 215011; Fax: 61 2 49 217398; E-mail: [email protected] or [email protected]

Conference announcement 13th IIRA World Congress ‘‘Beyond traditional employment. Industrial relations in the network economy’’ in Berlin, Germany (8-12 September 2003) For the second time, Germany has the honour and the privilege to host a World Congress of the International Industrial Relations Association (IIRA). The congress is scheduled to be held from 8-12 September 2003, on the campus of the Free University Berlin (FU Berlin). The general theme of the Congress is "Beyond Traditional Employment. Industrial Relations in the Network Economy". Traditional employment relations are changing, calling established regulations and practices into question. While developing countries have often not succeeded in attaining such standards, these are in a process of erosion in industrialised countries, especially as they move toward a service and knowledge economy. As seen from today’s perspective, this economy will put an even greater emphasis on networks among organisations and people. Network technologies, such as the Internet, are often an integral part of this development. Whether moving beyond traditional employment to a network economy will compensate for a loss of labour regulations and established employment practices is a vital issue to be addressed. Their are five thematic tracks which consist of a plenary session and several workshops each: 1 Enterprise Reorganisation: Negotiated, Consultative, or Unilateral? The preliminary topical foci of the workshops will be: .

National Models of High Involvement Practices;

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New Models of Coordination;

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Corporate Governance and Enterprise Reorganisation;

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Codetermination and Negotiated Change.

2 Changing Contours of the Employment Relationship and New Modes of Labour Regulation The preliminary topical foci of the workshops will be: .

The Gender Contract;

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Temporary Work and Call Centers;

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Regulating the Informal Sector;

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Knowledge Work Systems and Innovation.

3 Industrial Relations and Global Labour Standards The preliminary topical foci of the workshops will be: .

Corporate Codes of Conduct and Labour Standards;

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North-South-Perspective on Labour Standards;

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Labour Standards in NAFTA;

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Human Rights and Human Resource Management;

4 Collective Actors in Industrial Relations: What Future? The preliminary topical foci of the workshops will be: .

End of Employers’ Collective Representation;

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Towards Gendering of Trade Unions;

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Virtual Workplaces and Shifting Frontiers of Control;

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Unions as Social Capital.

5 European Integration: Convergence or Diversity? The preliminary topical foci of the workshops will be: .

Trade Unions and Social Europe;

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Social Dialogue: Vehicle of European Social Cohesion?;

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Challenges of EU Enlargement;

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European Integration as a Model for Social Regulation?

The German Industrial Relations Association is pleased to announce its choice of Berlin for this congress. Berlin is not only the new capital of a united Germany, it is a vibrantly cosmopolitan metropolis which has gone through an extensive process of rebuilding and new construction. Its cultural and architectural treasures are reknowned, and as a melting pot of East and West the city provides an unrivalled perspective on the German model of adaptation and change to meet the challenges of today. Further detailed information about the congress and the city as well as registration forms can be found at the Congress homepage http://www.fu-berlin.de/iira2003