Timo Anttila

It is important to track the trends of future working hours, since working hours have strong associations to everyday life and work-life interaction, but also to health. In this paper we aim to track the current and future trends in working hours. We discuss the trends through the key dimensions of working hours: the length, timing, tempo and autonomy. We also consider the role of current trends of spatial changes of work. Changes in working time patterns are fostered by several driving factors: globalization and business restructuring challenging the current work organizations, new information technologies, demographic and climate change and the current and future pandemic. The past and current tremendous changes in working hours indicate that changes in working hours will continue. The contemporary trends in future working hours pose risks for personal, family and social life, material well-being and health. At its best, however, the new post-industrial working time regime may provide more autonomy and time for recovery to employees as new technologies and changes in business structures release opportunities for greater individual autonomy over how, where, and for how long paid work is performed.

Discussions about social isolation have been extensive over the past few decades. A less sociable nature of social ties has been identified in Western societies. The phenomenon has been associated with demographic changes such as aging and living alone as well as changes in the use of new technologies. In this study we employ representative Finnish Time Use Surveys from three decades, 1987–1988 (n = 1887), 1999–2000 (n = 2673) and 2009–2010 (n = 1887) to examine the trends in social isolation, measured as time spent alone. Our results showed that between 1987 and 2010 the time spent alone increased by 124 min per day. The increase was linear and occurred in nearly all population groups. Structural factors, such as aging and an increase in the number of single households, are strongly associated with increased time spent alone. Time spent alone has increased, especially during leisure activities. Specifically, time spent watching television and using computers is associated with the decreasing tendency for face-to-face interaction.

According to European comparative studies, organisational change and restructuration have been especially prevalent in Nordic countries. In particular, public-sector organisations have been under turbulence due to pressures for cost reduction and increased efficiency. Yet, not much is known about how these changes have affected the organisation of everyday work. Based on the three waves of European Working Conditions surveys (2000, 2005, 2010), this paper analyses the change in the organisation of work in Nordic countries. The aim is to look into types of work organisation in public- and private-sector organisations in Sweden, Finland, and Denmark. The questions asked are how the type of work organisation differs between sectors and to what extent are there changes in the prevalence of work organisation types. According to the results, the trend is a move away from the use of forms of work organisation characterised by high levels of learning and autonomy to more constrained or formalised forms. However, differences were also found between countries and sectors. The formalisation of work (i.e. features characteristic especially of the lean model of work organisation) is more common in the public sector and in Finland and Denmark compared to Sweden.

Technological innovations and information and communications technology (ICT) have many complex implications for social life. Time is popularly identified with famine, squeeze and accelerated ICT use. Wajcman and Bittman state that the contemporary view of increased time pressure may have more to do with the fragmentation of time than with any measurable reduction in primary leisure time. Hence, hurriedness appears as a result of more fragmented time. It is also justified to ask if there are practices of time management and control that are used to resist time contamination that inevitably cause feelings of hurriedness. In addition to their constraining and time-fragmenting nature, ICTs may also have a time saving, controlling and coordinating role. One central element of everyday life is the coordination of various activities and time frames. This chapter draws from research concerned with how various forms of ICTs change the relation of time and implications for social relationships.

Globalization with its many side-effects on working life is seen to pose accentuated risks especially for women and low skilled workers – resulting in increasing polarization of job quality. In contrast to “universal theories”, institutional theories claim changes in work life might vary according to the institutional and cultural frameworks which mediate the global pressures of change. This study analyses job quality trends in Finland at the intersection of class and gender. The results, based on the Finnish Quality of Work Life survey (1977–2013), find no clear evidence of polarization. In line with the institutional theory’s prediction of a low risk of polarization in coordinated and inclusive Nordic countries, improvements have occurred for blue-collar workers in terms of autonomy and opportunities for development at work, reducing the gap between social classes. Furthermore, the negative sides of work life, such as insecurity and time pressures have become common experiences regardless of social class. The ‘welfare state paradox’ hypothesis on the comparative disadvantage of women in higher positions in the labour market does not gain support in 2013: the upper-white collar women have attained roughly similar levels of job quality to their male counterparts.

The organization of times and places of work are key elements of working conditions, and define employees’ possibilities for balancing work and other life spheres. This study analyses several aspects of temporal and spatial flexibility, and their associations with employees’ work-life balance. This study separates four dimensions of temporal flexibility and one indicator of spatial flexibility. The dimensions of temporal flexibility are the number of hours worked, when the hours are worked, work-time intensity, and the degree of working-time autonomy. The workplace flexibility indicator is an index of work locations. Work-life balance is analysed with work-hour fit. The analyses were based on the fifth wave of the European Working Conditions Survey collected in 2010. We used data from 25 Member States of the European Union (n = 25,417). Based on the hierarchical cluster analysis, this study found various types of flexibility regimes in Europe. Country clusters show a clear effect on perceived work-life balance even after controlling for flexibility measurements at the individual level. This study contributes to the existing research in analysing several dimensions of temporal and spatial flexibility at the same time, as well as their associations to work-life balance.