Workaholism, Leisure and Pleasure - Part I
The official working week has been reduced to 35 hours a week in
France. In most countries in the world, it is limited to 45
hours a week. The trend during the last century seems to be
unequivocal: less work, more play.
Yet, what may be true for blue collar workers or state employees
- is not necessarily so for white collar members of the liberal
professions. It is not rare for these people - lawyers,
accountants, consultants, managers, academics - to put in 80
hour weeks.
The phenomenon is so widespread and its social consequences so
damaging that it has acquired the unflattering nickname
workaholism, a combination of the words "work" and "alcoholism".
Family life is disrupted, intellectual horizons narrow, the
consequences to the workaholic's health are severe: fat, lack of
exercise, stress - all take their lethal toll. Classified as
"alpha" types, workaholics suffer three times as many heart
attacks as their peers.
But what are the social and economic roots of this phenomenon?
Put succinctly, it is the outcome of the blurring of boundaries
between work and leisure. This distinction between time
dedicated to labour and time spent in the pursuit of one's
hobbies - was so clear for thousands of years that its gradual
disappearance is one of the most important and profound social
changes in human history.
A host of other shifts in the character of work and domestic
environments of humans converged to produce this momentous
change. Arguably the most important was the increase in labour
mobility and the fluid nature of the very concept of work and
the workplace.
The transitions from agriculture to industry, then to services,
and now to the knowledge society, increased the mobility of the
workforce. A farmer is the least mobile. His means of production
are fixed, his produce mostly consumed locally - especially in
places which lack proper refrigeration, food preservation, and
transportation.
A marginal group of people became nomad-traders. This group
exploded in size with the advent of the industrial revolution.
True, the bulk of the workforce was still immobile and affixed
to the production floor. But raw materials and finished products
travelled long distances to faraway markets. Professional
services were needed and the professional manager, the lawyer,
the accountant, the consultant, the trader, the broker - all
emerged as both parasites feeding off the production processes
and the indispensable oil on its cogs.
The protagonists of the services society were no longer
geographically dependent. They rendered their services to a host
of geographically distributed "employers" in a variety of ways.
This trend accelerated today, with the advent of the information
and knowledge revolution.
Knowledge is not geography-dependent. It is easily transferable
across boundaries. It is cheaply reproduced. Its ephemeral
quality gives it non-temporal and non-spatial qualities. The
locations of the participants in the economic interactions of
this new age are transparent and immaterial.
These trends converged with increased mobility of people, goods
and data (voice, visual, textual and other). The twin
revolutions of transportation and telecommunications really
reduced the world to a global village. Phenomena like commuting
to work and multinationals were first made possible.
Facsimile messages, electronic mail, other forms of digital
data, the Internet - broke not only physical barriers but also
temporal ones. Today, virtual offices are not only spatially
virtual - but also temporally so. This means that workers can
collaborate not only across continents but also across time
zones. They can leave their work for someone else to continue in
an electronic mailbox, for instance.
These technological advances precipitated the transmutation of
the very concepts of "work" and "workplace". The three
Aristotelian dramatic unities no longer applied. Work could be
performed in different places, not simultaneously, by workers
who worked part time whenever it suited them best.
Flextime and work from home replaced commuting (much more so in
the Anglo-Saxon countries, but they have always been the
harbingers of change). This fitted squarely into the social
fragmentation which characterizes today's world: the
disintegration of previously cohesive social structures, such as
the nuclear (not to mention the extended) family.
All this was neatly wrapped in the ideology of individualism,
presented as a private case of capitalism and liberalism. People
were encouraged to feel and behave as distinct, autonomous
units. The perception of individuals as islands replaced the
former perception of humans as cells in an organism.
This trend was coupled with - and enhanced by - unprecedented
successive multi-annual rises in productivity and increases in
world trade. New management techniques, improved production
technologies, innovative inventory control methods,
automatization, robotization, plant modernization,
telecommunications (which facilitates more efficient transfers
of information), even new design concepts - all helped bring
this about.
But productivity gains made humans redundant. No amount of
retraining could cope with the incredible rate of technological
change. The more technologically advanced the country - the
higher its structural unemployment (i.e., the level of
unemployment attributable to changes in the very structure of
the market).
In Western Europe, it shot up from 5-6% of the workforce to 9%
in one decade. One way to manage this flood of ejected humans
was to cut the workweek. Another was to support a large
population of unemployed. The third, more tacit, way was to
legitimize leisure time. Whereas the Jewish and Protestant work
ethics condemned idleness in the past - the current ethos
encouraged people to contribute to the economy through "self
realization", to pursue their hobbies and non-work related
interests, and to express the entire range of their personality
and potential.
This served to blur the historical differences between work and
leisure. They are both commended now. Work, like leisure, became
less and less structured and rigid. It is often pursued from
home. The territorial separation between "work-place" and "home
turf" was essentially eliminated.
(continued)