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While previous literature has examined time discourses in social work and demonstrated that social work is predicated on linear understandings of time, one area that has received little theoretical and empirical attention in the literature on time and social work is what effects various social work temporalities exert on the lifeworld of social workers and how they shape their working days. This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with British social workers and employs an abductive approach to data analysis. By analysing the participants' experiences of time and work, the article identifies two temporalities that exist in social work practice, paperwork time and compassionate time. Paperwork time is linear, instantaneous and accelerated, requiring social workers to juggle multiple competing demands and needs. Compassionate time is more developmental and cyclical and requires slower engagement. The paper then discusses how social workers negotiated these contradictory temporalities and highlights the potentially negative effects of temporal conflicts on people's health, well-being and on social work practice at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by G.H. Mead's philosophy of time and his focus on the present as the site of interpretation of past experiences and thoughts about the future, this paper makes cross-national comparisons between four cases of young Norwegian and British men. The method is case-based biographical analysis. Levels of biographical time, family time and historical time intersect in young men's orientation to the future in a present set in the current contexts of Norway and Britain. The overarching question addresses if and how timing at the biographical level, related to family time and resources, harmonise with features of opportunity structures in the national contexts. Two typologies are identified: those whose future orientations correspond with standards for 'successful' trajectories are named confident continuity while cautious contingency characterises the orientation of those whose biographical timing of transitions is not in synchrony with family time nor with standards in the current opportunity structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores issues of tune in relation to female EU migrants' integration into EU work environments. The data is based on in-depth interviews undertaken with migrants in the nursing and banking professions in Britain, Gennany and Spain from 1993 to 1994, and is complemented by interviews and group discussions with native workers, representatives of employers and regulatory bodies. Differences in migrants' experiences are explained by reference to national distinctions between the two professions and the three countries. Comparative analysis suggests that the barriers encountered by migrant women can be largely explained by differences in systems of work organization and practices which shaped expectations and attitudes of workers and employers. Findings imply that genuine free movement of labour between member states requires measures which go beyond the mutual recognition of qualifications and skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes a significant empirical contribution to our understanding of why people in the United Kingdom without childcare responsibilities actively reduce or limit the amount of time they spend in paid employment. We show how the negative aspects of employment (push factors) and the desire to spend time in more varied and enjoyable ways (pull factors) interact to produce decisions to enact working time reductions (WTRs). The push factors include excessive workloads and difficult or tedious tasks which can result in stress and mental exhaustion. For people working non-standard schedules, their lack of control over hours can make it difficult to enjoy the free time that is available. The pull factors we have identified include traumatic experiences such as illness or the early death of a loved one which can lead to an increased awareness of the salience of time. Also important was the desire to develop skills and subjectivities unrelated to work-time identities. An overarching theme in the interviews was the idea that full-time work leads to a loss of autonomy, and a reduction in hours is a route to greater freedom. These motivations are contrasted with understandings of WTRs present in the empirical and predominantly quantitative literature which highlight the structural constraints that often force women in particular into part-time work as a result of childcare responsibilities. An exploration of the motivations of short-hour workers is pertinent, given increasing concern that long hours of work exacerbate multiple social, economic and environmental problems. We suggest that a deeper understanding of why individuals want to work less could help facilitate 'priming' campaigns aimed at increasing demand for WTRs more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research and policy on international students' study-to-work transition fall short of a temporal theoretical perspective that is sensitive to the fluid and class-stratified nature of their career imagination. Career imagination refers to how international students conceive of, enact and reconfigure their careers as they encounter novel circumstances along their life courses. Drawing on in-depth interview data with 21 Chinese international students and graduates at UK higher education institutions, this article adopts a primarily Bourdieusian framework that centres around how time, class and privilege intersect to shape these students' career imagination. In this framework, time is conceptualised both as a form of coveted cultural capital and as an underlining mechanism that constitutes these students' habitus. This theoretical orientation facilitates exposition of the complex rationale behind the two observed temporal career strategies, 'deferred gratification' and 'temporal destructuring' and accentuates nuanced inequalities pertaining to fine-grained familial class backgrounds and places of origin of these students. This article furnishes empirical cases that challenge extant policy and empirical literature's tendency to consider international students and their career imagination as homogeneous, individualised and present-focused. Instead, the empirical findings reveal how these Chinese international students' career imagination is class-differentiated, embedded within and influenced by broader temporal structures and constantly evolving. This article thus advances understanding about how temporally sensitive and better differentiated career supports should be and could be tailored for international students at policy and practice levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is relatively uncontroversial to say that increasing workload, speed of change and the feeling that life is getting faster negatively impact on the academic profession. Drawing from primary data and secondary analyses, this article, nonetheless, highlights the specific ambivalence that emerges from investigations of time experience in contemporary academia. The argument presented here distinguishes between dominant oppressive acceleration with adverse implications and subtle, yet non-negligible, energizing accelerative moments. In the first instance, I explore how the increasing inability to determine one’s own temporal rhythm results in increasingly reported feelings of guilt. These feelings are, moreover, exacerbated by the currently ubiquitous doctrine of ‘excellence’, which has specific temporal connotations. Second, reflecting on phenomenological aspects of research conduct – a constitutive academic activity – I track the positive attributes of enabling acceleration as integral components of academic lifeworld. In this, I differ from the existing accounts analysing academic life in the fast lane, which unreservedly define acceleration in unfavourable terms, and yet in no way do I underestimate the seriousness of the negative consequences of rush, hurry and intensified workload for the scholarly profession. Broaching acceleration as a variegated experience, I conclude by outlining the inclusive conception of unhasty time and stress the need for its political enactment in higher education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did Local Exchange and Trading Schemes (LETS) fail to realise their promise in 1990s Britain? This article argues that a core reason was the inability to make community labour, a concept at the heart of LETS logic, function as a self-perpetuating dynamic, in which community bonding would encourage trade and trade in turn would build community. In exploring reasons for this failure, the article focuses on the centrifugal pull of two contrasting temporalities: community time and labour-market time. And in understanding why these two, normative, temporal orders were unable to combine, cohere or simply to coexist, the article addresses three factors: failure in design; individual member responsibility; and wider temporal pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Where working-time options are favourable to part-time ‘mummies’, part-time employment (PT) is likely to expand among other workers. The article adopts a case-oriented comparative approach in the UK and the Netherlands. Efforts to promote PT in the UK are hindered by segmentation and the long-hours culture, but job sharing is promoting an increase in the number of good PT jobs. In the Netherlands, PT is also gendered and segmented; however, access to PT is easier in a context of regulatory support where organizations, already facing short full-time employment and a high rate of PT, are learning to decouple business hours from employees’ shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Through metaphor (as ever), we explore some aspects of the mutually implicated context, ideo-text, ego-text and sub-text to be found in the contemporary UK academic lifeworld. To this end, carefully selected data from a qualitative study of the changing nature of academic work in Britain is analysed to speculate about how a discourse of performativity ('the RAE') has been `translated' into what appear to be `normalized' legitimate forms of organizing and social action. By illustrating how these forms are reflected in academics' liminal 'work talk', it emerges that one possible effect of this holographic process is a spatio-temporal constriction of the academic 'lifeworld'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the time politics of asylum in the United Kingdom from the 1990s. It argues that the new phase of globalization of migration has challenged the nation-state's traditional form of control over population movements in its territory. In the context of asylum policy in the UK, the state's response has been one of attempting to reorder and re-synchronize the movements and fates of a fast-increasing number of asylum seekers. The main strategy has been to speed up the asylum process through new legislation and administrative procedures. The article analyses this strategy and examines the limits to this time politics of speed, arguing for new ways of appropriating a global simultaneity made possible by technological transformation in the light of non-simultaneous processes unleashed by the global movement of people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]