Work,Time and Industry

Abstract

This article explores the impact of industrialization upon the concepts and experience of time and work. This has been viewed in terms of a transition from pre-industrial task-orientation to an organization of work based on clock time and disembedded from the field of workers' social relationships. It is argued here, to the contrary, that task-orientation remains central to the experience of work in industrial society, even though the reality of that experience is systematically denied by the `Western' discourse of freedom and necessity. The argument is exemplified by reference to ethnographic studies of locomotive drivers. It is concluded that clock time is as alien to us as it is to the people of pre-industrial societies: the only difference is that we have to deal with it.