Time, Work-discipline, and Industrial Capitalism

Critical Analysis

In this text, the author describes the evolution of measured time through history, and the relationship time has had with ethics and expectations of work. Specifically, the author asks, “how far, and in what ways, did this shift in time-sense affect labour discipline, and how far did it influence the inward apprehension of time of working people?”

Time measurement, through more primitive methods, has been a form of tracking work cycles as far back as the 1400s. This was primarily due to the necessity of working at certain hours; for example, fishing during the day, planting as specific parts of the year. Working from the morning to the evening is argued as natural in early farming. Some cultures viewed speed as problematic, as “a lack of decorum combined with diabolical ambition.” The sense of time passing in these cultures is one that is “more humanly comprehensible than timed labour” because it is a time of necessity, connected to natural productivity and sustenance. In these cases, there is only a small separation of working and non-working, as these are intertwined and task-based.

Modern perspectives view this, and other forms of task-based work, as wasteful and lacking in urgency. Time is now divided between someone’s “own” time and the time of their employer, and “the employer must use the time of his labour, and see it is not wasted… time is now currency: it is not passed but spent.” These views romanticize the hard work involved: “though the disinherited had no great parts of the fruits, still they shared in the achievement, the deep involvement and joy of it.”

The author then describes the evolution of formal time-keeping, driven by a bell ringing to summon those to workship, through detailed craftsmen developing exclusive timekeeping objects. In the early 1800s, “recorded time (one suspects) belonged in the mid-century still to the gentry, the masters, the farmers and the tradesmen.” It was elitist, due to the luxury and cost of timepieces. This collided with the development of the industrial revolution, where synchronized and timed labour became a necessary component of production. Early in the industrial revolution, work was still task-based, and there was little need for that synchronization; men were still “in control of their working lives” in that the work pattern changed between intense work and freedom to be idle. This idleness was generally tied to heavy drinking, which later acted to reinforce the idea of idle time as wasted time.

At some point, there is a change to industrialization, but the author argues that the idea of a “transition” for workers is overly simplistic, as this change impacts all of culture. This culture “includes the systems of power, property-relations, religious institutions, etc.” The transition is not towards industrialism, either; it is to industrial capitalism. This requires examining both “time-sense in its technological conditioning, and with the time-measurement as a means of labour exploitation.”

As early as 1700s, disciplinary time tools like “the time-sheet, the time-keeper, the informers and the fines” existed. As these became more prevalent, the tools were resisted, but “workers begin to fight, not against time, but about it.” This was a tacit acceptance that time-tracking obligations in the context of work are justified, and shifts the conversation to what kind of obligations and commitments (related both to hours worked and to compensation). The author notes that this then helped shape what unions fought for in more modern times; they “struck for overtime or time-and-a-half. They had accepted the categories of their employers and learned to fight back within them.”

A time-discipline had formed, and now persists. This is the idea of “time-thrift,” and “the leisured classes began to discover the ‘problem’ (about which we hear a good deal today) of the leisure of the masses.” Time for both employees and employers is something to be “consumed, marketed, put to use” and simply passing time is offensive and wasteful.

The author concludes by discussing the problem of leisure, asking how it became a problem, and for whom is it problematic, and why. Non-working time is considered to be consumable, and the author argues that a better way to consider this time is “what will be the capacity for experience of the men who have this undirected time to live?” To do this requires relearning fundamentals—“some of the arts of living lost in the industrial revolution”—where time is filled, enriched, social, and personal.

Research Value

The value of this work in informing my own research is that it:

• Positions design education as a form of indoctrination into the idea of time as earned and spent, and imposing a strong moral perspective that most time should be spent
• Questions to whom and what in the studio time is organized around, and what power dynamics are at play in that organizational structure
• Describes how leisure time and idle time was historically looked down upon, which is exactly the culture that emerges in a successful studio course; leisure is time not spent on design projects, which are claimed to require a great deal of time and effort to complete