An Introduction to Work-Related Deaths

Abstract

The phrase ‘work-life balance’ has become increasingly familiar and widely used in recent years as a means of describing the difficulty encountered in managing the competing time demands placed on individual life in the modern world and the encroachment of professional commitments into spaces previously set aside for personal commitments (Tausig and Fenwick 2001). Hochschild (1997) calls this the ‘time bind’: the diminution of private social relations due to the demands imposed by the economic and cultural value associated with work (also the ‘temporal trap’: Simon 2010). The way in which the identities of individuals are defined and constructed is increasingly shaped by work. One of the primary indicators used in defining our external identity is our job: what we do, what we earn, how successful we are (Goffman 1969). Those who work are defined by it; those who do not are increasingly socially excluded (Atkinson 1998; Young 1999). The result is the domination of individual life by work, a dominance which, as Richard Sennett (1998) points out, can have corrosive personal and social consequences.