Abstract
New policies are generally formed when conditions or circumstances that have long been taken for granted change, and either new problems arise or existing problems are perceived as relevant at the sociopolitical level. The temporal organisation of society was long considered—beyond conflicts about working hours—as unproblematic and therefore as not politically viable. However, this has begun to change gradually and selectively in recent decades. In particular, in the Nordic countries (the “temporal welfare state”) and in Italy (the “temporalities of the city”—“tempi della città”), the changing role of women in the family and the labour market and, in politics, the search for the “temporal compatibility” of these roles, triggered the first time policy discussions as far back as the 1980s. Later came an awareness of the social and environmental costs of the technology-driven acceleration of life, which fundamentally changed the European time culture in the past centuries.
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(Own translation). Whether this statement also can be supported empirically, however, is questionable. The results of the 4-day week at the VW factories point if anything in the direction of increased environmental consumption (for further discussion, see Sect. 2.1.1).
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http://www.statistik.rlp.de/fileadmin/dokumente/monatshefte/2001/05-2001-130.pdf (in German). A similar database exists at European level (Eurostat 2004).
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SOEP (international: GSOEP) is a representative repeat survey of private households in Germany, which has been conducted annually since 1984 with the same individuals and families in the Federal Republic (http://www.diw.de/en/).
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While it can be assumed that in Europe, given the historically strong position of trade unions and its own particular cultural inheritance, no significant extension of annual working hours should be expected for the time being (though doubtless of working life), the prosperity models carried by the working hours have a great influence as role models for countries now developing economically.
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In addition, the trends towards more flexible, more precarious and multiple employment lead to a need for repeated local reorientation, typically generating additional traffic and environmental consumption.
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However, it should be noted that while housework and food must be allocated to all members of a household, the drive to the football match, for example, must be assigned to one person only.
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See also the information platform “Working time preferences of employees”, published by the Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB) of the German Federal Employment Agency (http://infosys.iab.de/infoplattform/dokSelect.asp?pkyDokSelect = 93&sortLit = 2&show = Lit&title = Arbeitszeitpr%E4ferenzen_der_Besch%E4ftigten) (in German).
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See comments on the temporal welfare state in Finland in 4.1.
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This is obvious, although at the same time everyday stress per se seems to have an important function, because it is today attributed the same psychological function previously associated with the “daily grind”. “It prevents the realisation, required time and again, of how we intend to use our freedom to shape our daily lives. We are actually looking for relief from stress, but unconsciously; we are on no account looking to eliminate it” (Lönneker 2009, p. 9, own translation).
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The number of people working on Saturday and Sunday in Germany has doubled in each case in the last two decades (Boulin 2013).
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This does not imply, however, that people do not generally like clear time specifications: An astonishing number of people can focus on tasks and not continue to postpone them to the point of procrastination only through hard deadlines.
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In happiness research, happiness is usually operationalised and analysed in two dimensions: the first is the long-term, cognitive-dominated category of general satisfaction with one’s own existence (life satisfaction), and the second is the level of happiness or unhappiness perceived at the moment (affective states) (e.g. Argyle 1996; Diener and Oishi 2000). For an overview of the indicators frequently used in happiness and satisfaction research, see: Hofstetter and Madjar (2003, p. 13). It is known (but unproblematic in our context) that people systematically assess themselves as happier than they are (so-called “overconfidence bias” or “comparative optimism bias”) in surveys such as the World Values Survey (www.worldvaluessurvey.com), which includes data for 82 countries around the world.
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The other “hard-wired”, i.e. genetically determined biases are (van Vugt et al. 2014.): self-interest, short-sightedness and thus hyperbolic discounting of the future, imitation and the herd instinct, and ignoring not directly experienced risks and environmental changes.
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For a number of current studies from various disciplines, see the newly established information platform “Happiness—the relationship between happiness, work and income” published by the Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB) of the German Federal Employment Agency. http://infosys.iab.de/infoplattform/dokSelect.asp?pkyDokSelect = 125&sortLit = 2&show = Lit&title = Happiness_%96_wie_Gl%FCck,_Arbeit_und_Einkommen_zusammenh%E4ngen.
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The psychology of “mindfulness” was established in 1979 by Jon Kabat-Zinn, an academic at MIT in Boston. In 2012 alone, almost 500 academic papers were published revealing the links between mindfulness and various positive results (including stress reduction, creativity enhancement, improvement in compulsions and neuroses). Cf. Brown and Kasser 2005 et al.
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However, more recent studies indicate that journey times in rich countries are tending to increase due to ever increasing opportunities (e.g. Zahavi 1979; van Wee et al. 2006.).
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The term was coined by Reinhard Ueberhorst (1985).
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For an overview of international regulations on Sunday opening—and therefore national priorities—see Boulin (2013).
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An example of this is the Financial Market Stabilisation Act: as a result of the politically determined “due speed” (financial crisis, economic crisis, stock prices), a power shift in the German political system took place. “Responsibilities were withdrawn from the Bundestag, where parliamentary processes are particularly time-consuming, in favour of executive and expert bodies, who can make the decisions faster” (Wittmann 2013, p. 78, own translation).
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The US White House—which since 2013 has had a “behavioural insights team”—recently made the following basic assessment of a proposal (impact assessment) for new food labelling by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA 2014): “Changes in labeling may also assist consumers by making the long-term health consequences of consumer food choices more salient and by providing contextual cues of food consumption. We note that the behavioral economics literature suggests that distortions internal to consumers (or internalities) due to time-inconsistent preferences, myopia or present-biased preferences, visceral factors (e.g., hunger), or lack of self-control, can also create the potential for policy intervention to improve consumer welfare” (White House Document, Impact Assessment, 27.2.2014, emphasis mine).
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Reisch, L. (2015). Transformation of Time Regimes: Time as a Design Variable. In: Time Policies for a Sustainable Society. SpringerBriefs in Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15198-4_3
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