Capitalism and the History of Work-time Thought

Abstract

Between 1870 and 1980 total annual working-time in the major nations of the industrialised capitalist world fell by approximately 40 per cent. Why standard work-times should change has been a matter of debate for as long as capitalism has existed. This … [study] overviews the major contributions to the discussion. An examination of this nature is necessary because the contemporary work-time debate has become limited to the examination of worker preferences for income and leisure, of how these preferences manifest themselves and how workers, individually or collectively, go about attaining their preferred option. Such debate has become increasingly barren and irrelevant. This is because it is based on a number of major misconceptions and because there has been omitted from the discussion a factor that formerly dominated the whole question. This is the nature of the worker’s psycho-physiological capacities in relation to work and time. So buried has this factor become it is not even realised by many participants within the debate that the preference argument is only one of two traditional explanations for why changes to standard work-times occur.

(From C. Nyland, ‘Capitalism and the History of Work-Time Thought’, British Journal of Sociology, 37, 1986, pp. 513–34).