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# Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism

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and heterogeneous, it is harder, even for managers, to measure work in terms of the length or quantity of time: minutes, hours, days, weeks. We know that clock time cannot capture the properties of time, and that how we experience it has to do with social norms and organizational rules, conventions and culture.

The process whereby labor power (or “human resources”) is transformed into a product or service always involves tools and techniques. Examining how technological innovations enhance productivity by increasing the pace of work has been the focus of numerous studies. The iconic case is Henry Ford’s assembly line, which became standard in automobile plants all over the world. The advent of digital technology, however, represents a major and distinct break from earlier generations of machine technology. Crucially for my argument in this chapter, employees using information technology in modern work situations are largely responsible for the pace and rhythm of production.

This chapter will consider the temporal implications of ICT for men and women workers and ask whether the explosion in their use is to blame for our feelings of time pressure. Associated questions to explore are whether the stress of modern working life is attributable to the constant digital chatter that envelops us and the tendency for working time to colonize personal, family, and leisure time. More profoundly, are the temporal rhythms of work speeding up or assuming a radically diferent character?

Positive and negative outcomes are commonly associated with the anytime/anywhere connectedness of multiple devices, such as flexibility, mobility and enhanced work-life balance, along with the increasing pace of work. However, the received wisdom is that the pervasiveness of ICTs is intensifying work and fragmenting the workday, as well as extending work’s reach.1 I will take issue with this, arguing instead that work practices are being reshaped as employees negotiate the constant connectivity intrinsic to their work. In doing so, I will expose as simplistic the notion of the technologically tethered worker with no control over their own time. It fails to convey the complex entanglement of contemporary work practices, working time, and the materiality of technical artifacts.

This leads me, in the concluding section, to consider the relationship between time, technology, and the meaning of work for identity. I will examine whether the wider socioeconomic conditions of work, rather than the technologies themselves, are producing acceleration—in particular, whether changes in the nature of careers and organizational cultures are contributing to feelings of anxiety about speed. The disruption of linear time as it was lived according to the standard narrative of long-term, stable employment also crucially afects our perceptions of the pace of work.

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Looking Back in Order to Look Forward

Where better to start than with some history, including my own? It was as a student of industrial sociology in the 1970s that I first became interested in the relationship between technology and the speed of work. As I outlined in chapter 2, historians of the Industrial Revolution have written about the importance of clock time in disciplining labor and increasing productivity in early manufacturing. The emergence of the automated car assembly line was the culmination of this drive to apply technology to intensify the rate of work. Henry Ford’s renowned innovation built on the organizational principles of scientific management. Taylorism increased productivity by breaking down the labor process into component motions and work tasks, according to rigorous standards of time and motion study. Incorporating these principles, Fordism achieved dramatic gains in productivity by flowing the work to a stationary worker. The eficiency of this system of mass production was based on the subordination of workers to the momentum of the machine.

An avid participant in what became known as the labor process debate, I learned that technology is central to the control of work in a capitalist economy.2 In particular, this literature provoked my interest in the design of technology, and its influence is especially evident in the first edition of The Social Shaping of Technology.3 Rather than conceiving of technology as an autonomous force determining the organization of work, I argued that technology is itself crucially afected by the antagonistic class relations of production. While this perspective was reductionist in its own way, seeing technology as a tool of management, it did direct attention to the social relations of technology.4

Forensic studies of the evolution of technologies revealed that patterns of power and cultural values shape the actual processes of technological development. For example, David Noble’s famous study of the automation of machine tools showed that automation did not have to proceed in the way it did; rather, the form of automation was the result of deliberate selection. Industrial innovation is, then, a product of a historically specific activity carried out by social groups for particular purposes: “behind the technology that afects social relations lie the very same social relations.”5 In other words, technical choices are simultaneously social through and through.

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Moreover, Noble stressed that there were many diferent levels of social determination of technology. While management’s demand for control over workers was critical, so was the role of the military, as well as the ideology and interests of engineers. Importantly, he argued that “engineering rationality” takes the view that the most eficient production process is the most automated. This impulse, to eliminate the human element from production because it is the potential source of “human error,” still prevails.

In brief, the social shaping approach was concerned with emphasizing that politics and negotiation are the key processes through which technical possibilities are, or are not, put into practice. That is, the technologies of production we have are in some sense a reflection of the social relations of production. Our technological infrastructure and the material configuration of specific devices create more or less favorable conditions for job autonomy, control over efort, and the parameters of working time.

It is worth recalling, however, that this focus on design does not imply that the makers or marketers of a technology can reliably predict its final use. According to the textbook model, innovation is an activity restricted to engineers and computer scientists and, thereafter, technologies are autonomous and permanently fixed. In reality, studies have repeatedly shown that the way people adopt technologies is not necessarily in line with their intended usage.6 Nor are the afordances of technologies utilized in the same way by all users. Treating technologies as sociomaterial practices allows us to see that long after machines leave the industrial laboratory, their formation is still taking place. Technological change is thus a thoroughly contingent and heterogeneous process. There is nothing inevitable about the ways technologies evolve and are used in daily temporal practices.

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This point is particularly salient in relation to digital devices. The mobile phone and the personal computer are inherently more flexible than older, industrial technologies. While the utility of a machine tool is limited, a smartphone, for example, combines a phone, text messaging, e-mail, a web browser, camera, and a video recorder—and, importantly, it is all these things at once. So the device is not just one thing, it is what people make of it and how it connects to the existing social dynamics of work. In other words, we need to examine how users interact with ICTs in particular organizational contexts. So when I talk about how ICTs are changing the temporal rhythms of work, I always mean ICTs as they are embedded in social institutions, with preexisting conventions, cultures, norms, and objectives.

The Networked Worker

There is no denying that computerization has dramatically transformed work, arguably as radically as the industrial revolution did. While the shift to a postindustrial knowledge economy is often overstated, the efect of information technology on the structure of employment and the nature of jobs has been immense. The rise of service and administrative sectors means that our old paradigm of the technology of production, based on an age in which manufacturing dominated, is no longer adequate.

One indicator of this is the spectacular growth of ICT spending in corporate America since the 1970s, which has outpaced other types of equipment expenditures, even after taking into account a growing workforce and the declining price of computer hardware and software. For instance, the nominal annual US corporate IT investment from 1970 to 2008 increased from about \$5 billion to almost \$350 billion. Overall IT investment rose exponentially in the United States, from about \$100 per employee in 1970 to \$3,000 in 2008. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, American industries became 5.5 times more ICT intensive than they had been in 1995.7

Interestingly, economists disagree about the extent to which this vast expenditure has led to productivity growth. Robert Gordon, for example, argues that the inventions of the period 1870–1900, including electricity, running water, and the motor car, resulted in far greater productivity gains than the Internet, the web, and e-commerce combined.8 This issue is dificult to resolve, as it is well nigh impossible to disentangle productivity measures from the massive organizational changes wrought by information technology. As Manuel Castells stresses, new information technology is redefining workers, work processes, employment, and occupational structures, and the forms of this transformation have been the result of the “interaction between technological change, the institutional environment, and the evolution of relationships between capital and labor in each specific social context.”9

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A comparative overview of the impact of the informational paradigm on economic activity and levels of employment in diferent countries is provided by Castells, so I need not repeat that here.10 The important point to note is that while the relationship between technology and the quantity and quality of jobs is complex, the general trend is toward an increasing divergence between work patterns and between workers. On the one hand, there has been a large rise in highly educated managerial, professional, and technical occupations and, on the other, a growth in low-end, unskilled, service jobs. In the Anglo American context, this has been described in terms of the dual growth of good MacJobs (such as professions in computing and information technology) and bad McJobs (work in fast food, retail, and personal services).11 While high-end jobs are characterized by enhanced autonomy, low-end jobs are increasingly precarious (part time, temporary, and fixed term). The tendency for flexible working patterns cuts across these divisions but has very diferent consequences depending on the sector and type of job.

Overall, the rapid difusion of ICTs into workplaces has fundamentally altered how work is performed. Indeed, the Pew Internet survey describes most working Americans as “networked workers” because they use all three basic tools of the information age: the Internet, e-mail, and the cell phone.12 The trend is striking. In its first survey in March 2000, Pew found that 37 percent of full-time workers and 18 percent of parttime workers had Internet access at work. By mid-2011, this had grown to 76 percent of full-time workers and 52 percent of part time workers who use the Internet on the job. Sixty percent of workers use the Internet every day at work, while only a quarter say they never use computers. Almost all workers (87 percent) who have e-mail at work check their work e-mail at least daily. Half check their e-mails several times an hour, with just over one-third checking constantly. In addition, most workers have a mobile phone, and texting colleagues is common.

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Since the survey was completed, the purchase of smartphones, tablets, and laptops has soared and people are spending more and more time online. The mean amount of active Internet use at work has doubled from 4.6 hours per week in 2001 to 9.2 hours in 2010.13 This means that those who have Internet access at work are spending the equivalent of an entire workday per week online. Such estimates are notoriously dificult to make, as computers are on all day and are increasingly integrated into the work environment. It is also hard to get an accurate picture of what precisely the Internet is being used for. The Networked Workers survey found that, while at work, 22 percent of workers shop online, 15 percent watch videos, and 10 percent use online social or professional networking sites, while 3 percent play games. News consumption has also moved online and into the workplace as has pornography.14 The workplace use of ICTs is by no means confined to work purposes, and for some provides access to forms of relaxation at work.

What the data clearly show is that the frequency and type of technology usage at work varies significantly with diferent kinds of jobs. Nearly three out of four professionals and managers use the Internet at work, either constantly or several times a day. About half of clerical, ofice, and sales workers also use the Internet at work at least several times a day. Daily Internet use is much lower in other job categories. These patterns hold for cell phone use with one central diference. Workers in skilled trades (for example, electricians) have relatively high rates of work-only cell phone use, compared to the proportion of skilled trades people that report daily Internet use.

The enormous variation in ICT usage across diferent occupations and industries, even within North America and Europe, makes it impossible to generalize. It is not my aim to present an overview of all the diferent worlds of work with ICTs. Rather, I want to focus on the central claims that are made about the impact of ICTs on the working patterns of highly networked workers: the intensification of work and the extension of work beyond the workplace (discussed in chapter 6).

Large-scale surveys like Pew typically report that such employees express mixed views about the impact of technology on their work lives. On the one hand, they cite the benefits of increased connectivity and flexibility that the Internet and all their various gadgets aford them at work. On the other hand, many say these tools have added stress and new demands to their lives. Curiously, few workers feel as though e-mail alone has increased the total amount of time they spend working.15 In fact, most studies measure work “demands,” not work hours, and therefore the connection between ICTs and longer work hours has not been established.16

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Perhaps the time pressure we associate with ICTs, then, has as much to do with changes in the quality of working time, that is, an increase in the tempo or intensity of work, requiring us to work harder or faster. There are lots of ways we could think about this aspect of time pressure. The most interesting angle, in my view, is to explore three related aspects of work intensification: the pace of work, interruptions, and multitasking.

ICTs and the Pace of Work: Too Much Too Quickly?

Few American researchers have explored the impact of digital technology on work pacing.17 However, for many years the British economist Francis Green has argued that the difusion of ICTs is correlated with an increase in work efort, that is, a rise in “the proportion of efective labor performed for each hour of work.”18

This is evident in the finding of a British employment survey that the number of workers who report “frequently working at very high speeds or to tight deadlines” has risen to record highs.19 This is especially the case in workplaces where ICTs have recently been introduced. The report notes that the drivers of this intensification of work efort include management’s ability to monitor the flow of work, employees’ engagement with the new technology, and the heightened competitiveness brought on by the severity of the recession. While it is dificult to separate out the interconnected causes of rising efort levels, it is clear that ICTs increase management’s ability to track workflows and improve coordination and monitoring of employees’ performance, especially when staf are away from the ofice. Using ICTs, documents can be sent and received on the move while the flow of work is observed and maintained. Therefore, schedules can be altered at short notice, improving the microcoordination of tasks. Such flexibility encourages discretion, allowing an identification with project tasks rather than conformity with regulations, resulting in greater employee engagement. Green thus believes that the intensification of work is the result of managerial practices facilitated by technology and is not some pure efect of the devices themselves.20

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The extent to which employees have discretion and control over the pace with which they accomplish tasks is key to feelings of time pressure. My own Australian study on the impact of mobile phones at work concurs with Green that ICTs have intensified work efort.21 Especially for the men in my sample, using a mobile phone frequently while at work is significantly associated with both time pressure and other subjective indicators of work intensification. Frequently working under stress, working at speed to tight deadlines and time pressure are significantly correlated. However, does this mean that the mobile phone causes greater time pressure and stress? Or do those with stressful jobs who are under more intense time pressure use their mobile phones more often?

I concluded that it is not possible to determine the causal direction of the association. Workers are likely to experience more work, at an intense pace, under greater time pressure with more stress and heavier use of the mobile phone, as a single package. In other words, we need to be wary of making facile assumptions about the relationship between acceleration of the pace of work and ICTs.

Nowhere is this more the case than in discussions of information overload. Over the last decade, the increasing volume of e-mail has been talked about as a major source of stress. Countless management gurus advise us on how to take control and overcome the tyranny of our addiction to constantly checking e-mails. The legendary tale has Intel’s chief executive Paul Otellini instituting “no e-mail days” after criticizing his employees “who sit two cubicles apart sending an e-mail rather than get up and talk.”22 He did this out of conviction that more direct communication would boost productivity. Designed to be a speedy and time-saving technology, e-mail appears to have bogged us down in endless timeconsuming exchanges. So is e-mail the main culprit?

Few studies directly measure if, and how, e-mail overload contributes to the stress people experience. Typically, researchers infer stress by arguing that e-mail increases working hours. So the findings of an exceptional case study of knowledge workers in a high-technology firm are particularly striking.23 That study found that people blame e-mail for the stress they experience, regardless of the amount of time they work and the fact that other communication activities also exacerbate their workload and the stress they feel. In other words, e-mail is not just a source but also a cultural symbol of overload people experience in their lives. Moreover, the authors argue, “by serving as a symbol, e-mail distracted people from recognizing other sources of overload in their work lives.” Let me elaborate.

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The study set out to untangle the contradictory findings that e-mail is a growing source of stress while, at the same time, it enables people to gain control over their work and reduce overload, thereby reducing stress. So why do workers attribute their stress exclusively to e-mail?

The answer lies in a sociomaterial approach that recognizes social processes “as important as—if not more important than—a technology’s material properties for shaping its use and consequences.”24 Accordingly, and in close afinity with my own method, the authors examined the following: how e-mail’s material properties interact with the anxieties that e-mail evokes, the norms that govern its use, and the temporal distribution of communicative acts over the course of a day.

Nearly half of the knowledge workers (engineers, technical writers, marketing personnel) associated e-mail with a loss of control, in that they feared falling behind and missing important information. Using email eased their anxieties and allowed them to feel as if they were in control. Interestingly, the more time spent on e-mail, the more overloaded they felt, but the more messages they dealt with, the more they felt they could cope.

However, the speed of response was critical. Although e-mail’s asynchrony, or time-shifting property, should allow recipients to respond at a time convenient for them, in fact most employees use e-mail in ways that promote rapid response. This reflects a shared norm of responsiveness. Those who answered e-mail quickly were revered, while other employees described sanctioning processes that were enforced when coworkers did not adhere to this organizational norm.

Finally, the authors argue that the flow of daily communications also matters. When people spend significant parts of the day in other activities, e-mail builds up and becomes figural just as the workday is about to draw to a close. As a result, rather than complaining about how much time teleconferences and meetings consumed, interviewees focused on the inbox as the salient source of overload. E-mail provides a “culturally sanctioned rhetoric of complaint about overload as well as a tangible ritual for regaining control: to cope with overload, trim your inbox.”25

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It is the sociomaterial distinctiveness of e-mail that explains why it is a symbol of overload. Because e-mail functions to temporally decouple responses from messages sent, time away from continuous processing results in a build-up in the inbox. In order to maintain control, given the obligation to answer quickly, workers extended their workday. Their experience of meetings, teleconferences, and phone calls was vastly diferent. Because these activities are synchronous, requiring copresence for communication, they left no material reminder of unaccomplished work.

In sum, e-mail is singled out as a symbol of stress because of this entanglement of material, social, and quasimaterial factors surrounding its use. The authors conclude that the focus on e-mail masks the real causes of overload: new demands of work that crowd days and create unrealistic expectations about response time.

This study rightly interprets the temporal significance of e-mail as not simply due to the speed of data transmission, which conventional accounts would have us believe. Focusing on only one type of ICT, however, has its limitations. There is mounting evidence that people are more and more using a variety of simultaneous modes, being perpetually available via multimodal connectivity. Therefore, it is important to investigate the extent to which the resulting constant interruptions that fragment working time lead to harriedness.

Rethinking Interruptions at Work

Sylvia Ann Hewlett is known for her articles in places like Harvard Business Review on what she terms “extreme jobs,”—seventy-plus hour workweeks.26 She identifies six main “stressors” that cause exhaustion and burnout among people who work these long hours: rigidity combined with unpredictability, fast pace and tight deadlines, availability 24/7, constant travel, and work-related events outside regular work hours. But the sixth and chief stressor is the number of frustrating interruptions to the working day because of “canny communication devices.” With several screens on a worker’s desk, she says, an average of three minutes’ attention is given to any single task without interruption. This scrambling and jarring of attention kills any hope of serenity, and, at the end of the day, there’s usually a commute back to a domestic life of multitasking home and children.

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