The Social Construction of Work Times

Abstract

This article deals with the negotiation of time boundaries in a project group. The study grew up from a theoretical approach grounded in cultural psychology, where time is considered as a cultural artifact and as a dimension of the interactive environment that could be co-constructed by all participants through discourse. The relevance of the negotiation of the temporal dimension in work settings is still unexplored. Both qualitative and quantitative data of the first meeting of a project group of an Italian national bank working on the reorganization of front-office services show how the negotiation of temporal aspects is a core topic from the very beginning of the work. This study shows that when a project starts, all participants spend a lot of effort in defining different kinds of temporal boundaries as these represent very important dimensions of work planning; time is not treated as a single topic but participants differentiate organizational time, project time, meetings time and actual meeting time. Results strengthen the hypothesis of the interactional nature of time in work settings and show specific relationships with the contents of participants' discourses.