Abstract
The progressive speeding up of social life is a central and defining feature of modern societies. Many of the core elements of social acceleration are produced and experienced at the workplace, where the attraction as well as the pressures for speed are felt most vigorously. Thus, information and communication technologies are at the heart of the latest wave of acceleration in the twenty-first century. This chapter is divided in three sections: Sect. 4.1 reconstructs technological acceleration, the acceleration of social change, and the acceleration of the pace of life as the three defining processes of modernization. Section 4.2 then identifies the logic of competition, the modern cultural ideal of an “eternal life before death,” and the self-propelling nature of the “acceleration cycle” as the main driving wheels of social acceleration. The last section discusses the ambivalent consequences for working conditions and experiences. Here, the erosion of the capacity to appropriate the workplace, working tools, processes, and products, and to identify with them, appears to account for a tendency toward alienation from work and even for pathological symptoms like the burnout disease.
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- 1.
Harvey, however, referring to an inverse spatialization of time, cautions us to not dismiss space too quickly (Harvey 1990, pp. 272f).
- 2.
Quoted in Bauman (2000, p. 116).
- 3.
American sociologist Robert Levine and his team recently conducted a cross-cultural comparative empirical study in which three indicators for the speed of life were used: the speed of walking in inner cities, the time it takes to buy a stamp in a post office, and the exactness of public clocks. For a number of reasons I have discussed at length in Rosa (2013), this approach can at best serve as a very rough preliminary attempt. It certainly remains very unsatisfactory as an instrument in a thorough sociological analysis of the temporal structures of late modernity.
- 4.
For a synoptic discussion of the evidence, see Rosa (2013, chapter VI.1).
- 5.
For a very interesting economic explanation, see Lindner (1970).
- 6.
I leave aside at this point that this calculation is flawed, of course, for even if writing and sending an email message might take half as long as writing and sending a letter, thinking about and deliberating its content cannot be speed up at comparable rates. This might very well be a central explanation for why so many people report being completely overwhelmed and stressed out from the email business.
- 7.
Thus, elderly people in Western society are frequently unable to understand the “technobabble” the young use when talking about their Game Boys, emails, iPads, Blue Rays, etc.
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Rosa, H. (2014). From Work-Life to Work-Age Balance? Acceleration, Alienation, and Appropriation at the Workplace. In: Korunka, C., Hoonakker, P. (eds) The Impact of ICT on Quality of Working Life. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8854-0_4
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