So how are associates marked for extinction? Who lives, who dies, and why? It’s not simply a matter of hours. There is a calculus involved. Some firms really are “realigning,” or making up for lack of traditional associate attrition. Others are tossing deadweight as fast as possible from a sinking ship. But even though a number of agendas are at work, firms usually start at the same place: billables.

This kind of thinking relates to my notion of how value is created.  Those who sell their labour once to a firm are not as valuable as those that sell it a second time to a client. In this sense, the notion of employment itself has changed. If the purpose of the firm is not to employ people but to rent them out to other firms.

The employment relationship, under this logic, is not about selling one’s labour to a firm but providing one’s labour to a firm to sell to yet another firm. In this logic, law firms (or design firms that bill by the hour) are simply temporary agencies!

Read the entire article here.

This paper is about time regimes that are typical in interactive agencies, as well as law firms, some construction companies and some management consultancies: the so-called “billable hour.” In this paper I ask how such a system is constructed, what tools are used to maintain it, and, most importantly, how do Web workers resist it?

I argue that time regimes are particularly important to study today because time itself is being reckoned entirely differently than in industrial times. Digital tools, such as TimeControl, have changed the way we actually experience time itself. Once we had the seasons. We crudely discerned time’s passing through the position of the sun and the moon. Then we had industrialization, in which we more precisely measured time using clocks, ticking off hours, minutes and seconds. But now we have tools like TimeControl, which not only measure time precisely (something our minds really cannot do), but we also immediately combine measures of time with measures of “productivity,” such as number of Power Point slides completed, number of wireframes completed, etc.

Essentially I argue that time is a mashup now, and this has implications for how we experience it.

Then I argue that acts of concealment are symbolically important. To conceal a thing is to elevate it, paradoxically, to higher status. Concealment can be considered an act of resistance, but not always. For example, in his classic study of a machine shop, Burawoy argued that machinists’ concealing their outputs to “bank” it for later bonuses actually worked in favour of management. And resistance can take other forms, such as “cynicism,” as Fleming argued in his study of call centre workers. Resistance can be understood, he argues, as “defense of self,” and if workers defend their own way of being in the world, rejecting the managerial rhetoric of “go team,” they are actually resisting.

Finally, I summarize some qualitative findings from my research. I argued that these Web workers have a uniquely precarious working position because their jobs are frequently understood as part of the project budget, rather than as a traditional employment relationship. If billable work dries up, then so do jobs. This may seem like a report from the Obvious Department to some agency workers, but in other industries, there is no concept of “billable” time. Either the firm has business or it does not. One’s time is not a function of whether they are employable or not. In agencies, there is a much more direct line between time use and employment security.

I then examine the phenomenon of “hiding time,” which is common in interactive agencies. Workers routinely “hide” time in buckets or categories that are either billed directly to the client, or are ambiguous in their status. They do this, I argue, to “hide” the amount of non-billable time they spend because, and this is the point, non-billable time creates a “spoiled” identity. If a worker has too much non-billable time, they are suspect. Workers therefore conceal their non-billable time lest they be considered undesirable. They “keep” as much billable time as they can in order to project an “appropriate” self.

But does this hiding of time constitute resistance? I argue it does not. Workers do not cultivate an “oppositional self” in the agency. They do not overtly question the logic of billing by the hour (often because they see no alternative billing system). Workers do not undermine the legitimacy of the system itself, therefore, and implicitly accept that “billable” selves are better selves.

Read the whole paper below. Feel free to comment, particularly in advance of the conference. I’d like other academics to hear from agency workers.

sladner_ilpc_hiding_time

The essence of the paper is that billable hour rubrics breed a new kind of managerialism, one in which time is measured in tiny, cognitively unknowable bits. This transforms time into something constitutive of one’s employability.

Billable Hours, Time Reckoning and Labour Markets

Below is the PDF of the entire paper:

sladner_billablehours1

http://agencytime.wordpress.com

This chapter provides a summary of the entire dissertation, so it’s a good overview of the approach, findings, and conclusions.

Other chapters are available via email: samladner@mac.com

The number one problem I found in my research is that agencies are not explicit about workers’ expected availability. This was often because it was, not coincidentally, in the agency’s interest to have workers assume they were always available (check out my post on the online survey). My recommendations for agencies, then, centre on this issue.

1. Have a clear policy about contacting employees during “emergencies”: Agencies are places where one scholar suggested “someone is always pressing the panic button.” It’s part of the nature of the organization that there is always some kind of fire to put out. Agencies should make clear guidelines, however, around contacting employees at home.

   As a daughter of an operating room nurse and stepdaughter of a doctor, I know all too well what a REAL emergency means for family dinners. Agencies should recognize that when employees are contacted at home, their families are involved. What constitutes an emergency? Write that policy down and make it clear to everyone.

2. Compensate employees for all mobile technology use: Agency employees told me frequently of using their personal mobile phones and BlackBerrys for company purposes. This wasn’t a problem for most of them, but claiming it as an expense was. Workers should never be required to underwrite a company’s operating costs. This only breeds resentment.Instead, agencies should have a clear and easy expense reporting process for personal use of mobile technology. Employees will claim these amounts if the process is well designed, and their resentment will be lessened.
3. Abandon billable hours: this is my most radical recommendation. I’m sure many agency finance managers would scoff at my recommendation. But I am convinced that the only way any agency will be competitive, innovative, creative, and have lower turnover is to rid itself of billable hours.Billable hours change the agency’s business from selling creative solutions to simply selling time. Selling time? Yes, that’s it. Can anything be more easily commoditized that workers’ time? Every agency has workers, and every agency sells their time. This approach makes work/life balance all the more difficult because workers are continually required to sell ever more time — NOT EVER MORE VALUABLE SERVICES.

   Work/life balance means leaving work at work. When all you sell is time, you must always sell more of it to be competitive. Instead, sell services that are market differentiating. Don’t bill clients for time; bill them for the value you provide. This has the added bonus of employees being able to leave work at work. Good ideas are better created when workers have sufficient recuperation time.

Agency managers who doubt my recommendations may believe that agencies can continue in the vein that they have. But as any recruitment manager can tell you, it is exceedingly difficult to recruit and retain great employees. As employees get older and have families, the division between home and work only gets MORE important, not less.

Turnover is expensive. Smart agencies will firm up the home/work divide, not break it down.

This post is about what workers can do to improve their work/life balance (though I’m not letting organizations off the hook; they’re next). Individual workers can employ some simple strategies to blunt the effects of long hours and mobile technologies.

1. Track your hours, for yourself: have your own time sheet. Be absolutely compellingly honest. If you’re filling out a time sheet at work, keep another, private time sheet for yourself. It can be as detailed as you want it to be, but the key is that it is private and accurate. When you see how much time you are actually working, you may discover that you are working more than you’d like.

2. Decide on a clear end-of-work time for yourself: This could mean that you do not work after 6:30, whether that’s at work or at home. Having your mobile technology with you all the time makes it much easier to continue to work. But if you know your end-of-work time, you will know if you’re working overtime.
3. Cultivate work rituals: start work and end work each day with comfortable rituals. This could be something as simple as making a cup of tea, or checking your voice mail. But every time you sit down to work, perform your ritual (even if you’re at home and you’re just checking your email). Every time you finish work, perform your ritual. This will also show you how much you are working, but it will also make a clear division between work and non-work.
4. Schedule out-of-work events: Put non-work events in your calendar. These can be dinner with your partner, working out at the gym, or even shopping. Put them in your calendar not “to be organized” but to create some firmness to these events. All too often, personal events get pushed out because they are not firm. This is especially helpful if you involve someone else in these events. You will have to leave work because that other person is depending on you.
5. Resist the urge to be indispensable: Ask yourself why you are checking your email at
   11 p.m.? What is the deep psychological dynamic at play? Are you enjoying the attention? Are you scared for your job? Then you have much more important things to fix, namely, working on your need for attention or your anxiety about money. Consider working with a therapist or starting a spiritual study to reconcile this issue, ’cause checking yer email sure ain’t gonna fix it.

• how the right of workers to have a firm division between private and working time is an essential element to work. Yet this right is quite troubled by the emergence of new mobile technologies.
• how “professionals” have sacrificed private time for increased autonomy at work
• technology is not a “neutral” choice but a function of the existing social relations of where you work
• how workers in a case study industry (interactive agencies) deal with mobile technology and how it affects their private lives
• whether “ubiquitous availability” actually results in “professional” workplace autonomy
• why individual strategies of resistance won’t work and recommendations for companies that want to be competitive employers

• Introduction

Mobile technologies present a confounding development in one of the defining debates in the study of work: the division between work time and private time. The use of immobile technologies, from factory machines to desktop computers, has contributed to the spatial centralization of work on the one hand (Marglin, 1974) and to firm divisions between work and home and the other (Zerubavel, 1979). But the widespread adoption of cellular phones, laptop computers, wireless Internet, and mobile email devices, this spatial rigidity has broken down, complicating a central tenet implicit in most employment relationships: the right of workers to restrict access.

In most Western workplaces “…the individual has the right to claim control over his social accessibility during his private-time as a sort of possession” (Zerubavel, 1990, p. 171). The ability to possess and protect private time is indicative of worker’s autonomy in private life. It is autonomy over one’s work that differentiates a profession from a mere occupation, as is the ability to exercise exclusive control over a specific body of knowledge (Friedman, 2000; Greenwood, 1957; Larson, 1977) . Contradictorily, professionals with a great deal of work-time autonomy find their private-time autonomy compromised by expectations of continuous availability to work. Mobile technologies make it possible for home/work division to be more easily broken. Indeed, this was first noticed with doctors’ use of beepers, which represented a much lower threshold of “invasion” than did a personal telephone call to a doctor’s home (Zerubavel, 1990).

In this post, I investigate how mobile technologies affect the division between work and home among interactive agency workers. I find that the use of mobile technologies do indeed break down the home/work division, but their use alone does not necessarily result in this break down. Rather, it is the underlying social relations of workplaces that affect how individuals negotiate the use of these technologies in non-work time and space, with more senior workers having the power to manage the work of others in addition to having increased autonomy than junior workers.

• Technology is not a neutral choice

Technology scholars have characterized technology as essentially liberating (e.g., Pool, 1983), responsible for widespread social change (White, 1978) or dehumanizing (Ellul & Illich, 1995). All of these scholars share a deterministic view of technology, conferring upon it the agency to change social structures somehow outside of its own social context. Others scholars reject this view and argue that that technology does not emerge exogenously from its social context. This school of thought — often referred to as the social construction of technology (SCOT) school of technology studies — attributes both technology’s design and its effects primarily to its social context. I take SCOT as my theoretical starting point, arguing that the use of mobile technologies in a workplace is necessarily reflective of the social relations within that organization.

The SCOT approach emphasizes the interplay between technology and organizations. The organization shapes the technology and the technology shapes the organizations. This notion of a mutual constitutional relationship highlights the mistaken belief that introducing technology into an organization is a neutral choice. Social assumptions are built into what kinds of technology are chosen, and technologies, once introduced, have unintentional organizational consequences (Williams & Edge, 1996).

• What we don’t know about mobile technology and work

It appears that mobile technology is lengthening the working day. Stories in the popular press abound about “CrackBerry” use, “work addiction,” and anecdotes of vacations not taken. While it is clear that there is an increased use of mobile technologies, there is very little scholarship that has examined its effects on the practice of work. Scholars have focused either on the culture of extreme overwork or mobile technologies. But there is little that connects overwork specifically with mobile technology use.

There is a deep need for such scholarship. Typical office technology is becoming essentially mobile technology. Where once immovable computers and landline phones were the norm, mobile versions of these technologies are becoming the default choice. Growth in laptop computer sales continues to outpace those of desktop computers. In 2005, 21.6% of all computers sold in the United States were portable, compared to 42.3% for desktops.

Research company IDC found that this share grew to 26.1% in 2006, and predict it will grow to 42.3% by 2009 (International Data Corporation, 2007b). Mobile phones are also increasing in numbers. The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association reports that 47% of all telephone connections in Canada are now mobile connections (Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, 2007). Businesses are the primary consumers of email-capable devices such as BlackBerrys. According to the International Data Corporation, companies around the world will purchase 82 million smartphones, personal data assistants and BlackBerrys by 2011 (International Data Corporation, 2007a).

• Long hours and technology work

Scholars of high technology workplaces have taken up this focus on extremely long working hours. But these studies typically assume that “work,” is spatially fixed to the physical office of the organization. For example, in their study of video-game workers, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2006) find that organizations have ample ability to avoid long hours of “crunch time” before a new game is shipped, but long hours are considered de rigeur in the industry. Workers spend upwards of 100 hours per week at work. It remains unknown how this work has been transformed (or not transformed) by the use of mobile technologies. It’s clear that the practice of work affects these workers’ home lives, as many of them leave the industry in order to have time with their families.

Garrett and Danziger find that there is a subset of occasional teleworkers they call “flexiworkers” (Garrett & Danziger, 2007). “Flexiworkers” work in the office, at home, and on the road. They make up about 5% of all teleworkers, and had the highest level of influence over their jobs (more than 75% say they are very influential). They are highly committed to their jobs and also experience a high degree of pressure to succeed. But they are time poor: 55% of flexiworkers report a low ability to keep up with their workload, higher than any other kind of teleworkers. This finding begs the question: under what conditions are flexiworkers able to restrict access during non-work hours? To what degree do flexiworkers demonstrate Zerubavel’s notion of professional availability?

The interactive agency workers in this study are active users of mobile technology, with most having been issued a laptop computer by their workplaces (raw data embargoed until peer-review publication).

Interestingly, these workers also had a large number of personal mobile technologies, many of which they often used for work (raw data embargoed). Of particular interest is the number of these workers that use their personal mobile phones for work.

• Motivations for bringing work home

In this study, I interviewed and surveyed interactive agency workers. I found that workers had several motivations for bringing work home, including:

• Need for quiet working space
• Personal use / general web surfing
• Impression management (demonstrating higher status conferred on mobile tech)

• Part of the family

One the effects of the existence of mobile technologies, and the motivations to take them home, was the unintended entrance of one’s work into one’s private sphere. The ease with which mobile technologies come home renders the division between work and non-work far more porous than once before.

The presence of a laptop in shared family space lead to home/work conflicts. Respondents had a variety of ways of working around family members, but there were ambiguous boundaries of what constituted “work.” Some respondents noted their families accused them of “not being present” when the laptop was open, while others suggested it was the content of the laptop that mattered.

• Ubiquitous Availability

Zerubavel argues that professionals’ work-time identities extend into their private lives more than non-professionals. He uses the example of nurses and doctors. Nurses who are “not on shift” can even sit at the nurses’ station and legitimately claim they have no responsibility to respond to work demands. Doctors, on the other hand, are publicly admonished (even by nurses) when they do not respond to work demands while at home. Beepers and telephone calls reinforce this norm.

This is also the case in interactive agency workers. The pervasive use of mobile technology casts a veil of ambiguity on the division between work and non-work for all workers. Mobile technologies allow for ubiquitous availability, particularly for senior workers who deal directly with clients. It also facilitates the availability of junior workers, despite the fact they rarely dealt directly with urgent requests from clients. The norms within the industry mirror those more of Zerubavel’s “professional” expectations of doctors’ availability, rather than nurses’. In the online survey, I found a significant number of interactive agency workers considered themselves “available” for work in off-hours. A large number (20) of these workers even considered themselves available for work during their vacations (raw data embargoed).

The practice of “checking in” becomes institutionalized. Respondents found that availability was disciplined through an expectation of immediate response. There is a subtle set of signals that junior workers learn as they move up the corporate ladder.

• Paying to be available

The norm of ubiquitous availability is so strong that respondents routinely use their own personal technology to be available for work. In this sense, the burden of availability is borne only by the worker, and not the company. Often the need for availability is not formally recognized by company policy, as many of these workers do not receive company-issued mobile phones even though they use their own mobile phones regularly for work-related purposes. Workers effectively subsidize their companies’ operating expenses either by paying for mobile phone bills themselves, or face the burden of expensing it as work-related expense

• Strategies for restricting access

Workers employed a variety of resistance strategies to firm up the divisions between work and non-work, but these strategies were highly individualized and informal. The struggle to act autonomously in private life was exceedingly difficult, given the pervasive use of mobile technologies.

Workers employed the following strategies:

• Inconspicuous “blocking” or not answering chat/mobile phone requests
• Using different online identities in private and working life
• Striving to “turn off” technologies when around family

With no official policy limiting the use of mobile technologies, it was ambiguous as to what constituted true urgency and where fellow workers were to respect another worker’s private time.

• Discussion and conclusion

This dynamic of ubiquitous availability is similar to that which Zerubavel describes for doctors. Doctors are expected to allow access during their private time. In exchange for this access, doctors are afforded various luxuries that nurses are not. They are not required to begin work at a fixed time, they have considerable autonomy in managing their workflow and employing professional discretion. Likewise, nurses’ exchange their relative lack of professional discretion for their right to restrict access in private time.

Like doctors, interactive agency workers regularly sacrifice their private time for work. The presence of mobile technology renders an end-of-shift ritual moot; work often goes home with these workers. Unlike doctors, however, interactive agency workers enjoy no formal recognition of this sacrifice of private time. These workers are expected to provide access in private time, but they do not receive in exchange the same kind of professional autonomy as doctors, nor are they paid overtime pay for being “on call.” The right to restrict access is not recognized as inalienable right in this industry. Indeed, this industry troubles the very notion of private time in that it contravenes Zerubavel’s contention that “one of the most common ways of denying a person that right is to buy it from him” (Zerubavel, 1990, p. 171).

Expectations of continuous availability are nothing new in the advertising industry. Writing in 1956, Mayer described the expectations of long hours:

Advertising men (sic), in fact, rarely get much time away from their jobs. They work in a windy atmosphere of shifting preferences where crisis is a normal state of affairs, and (as one advertising manager puts it) ‘someone is always hitting the panic button’ (Mayer, 1958, p. 10).

The workers in this study would likely be expected to put in the same hours even without the use of mobile technologies. Their widespread adoption has arguably “freed” these workers from long hours at the office, but has had the unintentional effect of blurring the line between private and work-time identities. The ability of workers to restrict access is therefore greatly compromised by the use of mobile technologies in the absence of official company policy of what warrants appropriate use.

This study also demonstrates that few of these technologies support workers’ strategies of resistance because restricting access is not embedded within the technologies themselves. Designers of mobile technology should consider the concept of restriction of access when designing new technologies. Unobtrusive measures such as “blocking” contacts without their knowledge are likely to be employed by workers who wish to anonymously resist demands for private-time access. Scholars of technology would do well to include the notion of restriction of access when studying technology’s impact, particularly when the context being studied involves clear potential for compromised autonomy.

But no design of technology will bring clarity to the issue of private versus work time. These workers employ various methods of restricting access that are, in the long run, unsuccessful because they individualized and not sanctioned by the organization. Only through specific organizational policies that codify restriction of access or organized and collective worker resistance that private time will be protected in the context of pervasive mobile technology use.

The dissertation itself now runs a respectable 245 pages. In this post, I provide a summary of the arguments, chapter by chapter. I will be giving this draft to the committee this week. You too are invited to evaluate my research and provide your comments. I expect many comments will be already accounted for in the full-length version, but that’s no reason to subject blog readers to a massive PDF.

In this post:
Chapter 1: The “good interactive agency worker”
Chapter 2: Improving theories of time
Chapter 3: Constructing working-time norms: gaps in the literature
Chapter 4: Method and Research Design
Chapter 5: “Long and unstructured”: the interactive agency timescape
Chapter 6: “You become a commodity”: The commodification of labor time
Chapter 7: “The Dad on the cell phone”: Negotiating the work/home divide
Recommendations and Conclusions

• Chapter 1: The “good interactive agency worker”

In Chapter 1 of this dissertation, I employ the “good worker” archetype as a means of describing working time norms. I connect the interactive agency to its dual roots in both advertising and Internet industries, demonstrating that it is advertising that takes the dominant role in shaping these industrial cultures. Popular discourse portrays the “good Web worker” as “revolutionary,” but I demonstrate that this archetype has a deeply internalized norm of excessive working time, which is not revolutionary at all. I show also that the “good advertising worker” has a deeply internalized norm of long hours. I connect these two legacies to the “good interactive agency worker” discourse of interactive agencies.

• Chapter 2: Improving theories of time

In Chapter 2, I review theories of time and argue that political economy approaches can and should draw upon complementary theories of time. Political economists of working time have implicitly accepted the notion of clock time without fully examining other elemental aspects of time. This focus on the economic nature of time provides little guidance in understanding how clock time is socially constructed as the dominant time-reckoning system of any organization and what kinds of practices cement clock time.

I seek to remedy this oversight by reviewing theories of time that fall outside typical workplace studies. In this vein, I draw upon the symbolic interactionist and phenomenological traditions to adapt and expand Adam’s “timescape” approach (Adam, 1998).

My theoretical framework conceives of time as a product of economic, symbolic and subjective experience. The division between working and private time is cast within a particular social construction of time; I seek to unravel this process.

• Chapter 3: Constructing working-time norms: gaps in the literature

Time often defies a quantitative definition (Sorokin & Merton, 1990). Yet there is a tendency to conceive of working time as a quantitative phenomenon, which is due, in part, to scholars’ preference for a political economic lens in working time literature. In Chapter 3, I review the empirical literature on working time and find few political economy approaches that adequately describe the social construction of time reckoning in organizations. I find conflicting evidence: some scholars find that workers are sacrificing private time in favor of working time, while other scholars find just the opposite. Consequently, the debate around working time focuses largely on whether workers are working “more hours.” I argue that this debate misses the essential point: working time is a function of its social construction and as such, it is experienced fundamentally differently, regardless of length of the working day. It is this character of working time – that its conception and experience has qualitatively changed – that is most relevant to the study of conflicts between work and home.

• Chapter 4: Method and Research Design

Accordingly, in Chapter 4, I briefly review the choices and trade-offs I faced in designing this research project. I summarize the qualitative methodology I employed for the empirical portion of this dissertation. I use qualitative understandings of time and therefore qualitative methods.

• Chapter 5: “Long and unstructured”: the interactive agency timescape

In Chapters 5, 6, and 7, I review the empirical findings of this study. In Chapter 5, I describe the timescape of the interactive agency by reviewing the time frames, timing, tempo and temporality of the interactive agencies I studied. I find that the agency timescape is a jagged, fragmented temporality that is fundamentally at odds with the static even mechanistic time-reckoning system of time sheets. Interactive agency workers describe a shifting and uneven timescape while time sheets – the dominant time-reckoning systems in these organizations – render time as an unchanging, rational phenomenon. This tension between the actual timescape and the time-reckoning in time sheets begs the question: why have time sheets at all?

• Chapter 6: “You become a commodity”: The commodification of labor time

In Chapter 6, I explore the ostensible and actual reasons for time sheets and billable hours. Time sheets are acknowledged to be imperfect records of actual work completed; they are frequently changed and the behest of client demands. This suggests that time sheets may have some other purpose than simply to track time. The ostensible reason for time sheets, despite their faults, is to facilitate the billing of clients. But their actual purpose is to create a time-based measure of performance for workers.

You cannot govern (or improve) something you do not measure. Time sheets allow time, a qualitative phenomenon, to be first measured, then secondly acted upon.

Time sheets render commodified labor visible. The billable hour represents a privileging of working time, with non-billable administrative work not “counting” as much. Workers are acutely aware of “how billable” they are (how much of their labor is sold directly to a client). Workers avoid showing up as “available” in the system, and ensure that they do not record too many “non-billable” hours in their time sheets. The result is an internalized – and therefore obscured – motivation to log as many “billable” hours as possible. Non-billable work (which is essentially work that a client does not agree to pay for) is still required of these workers and often bleeds into private time.

The technology used to record time use also reinforces the commodification of labor. Time sheets in these agencies are typically filled out through an intranet system, though some agencies still use paper time sheets. Once labor time is recorded as a number, it is possible to abstract the labor that number represents. Labor time, in this context, revealed as “standing reserve,” that is, as something waiting to be used. But time represents labor time or people. Time sheets play a role in the common agency practice of referring to people as “resources.”

• Chapter 7: “The Dad on the cell phone”: Negotiating the work/home divide

In Chapter 7, I explore the impact of this commodification of labor time on the division between working time and private time. I demonstrate that the commodification of labor time does indeed create significant conflicts between home and work. I explore how mobile technology exaggerates the effect of commodified labor time by allowing work literally to invade workers’ homes. I also show how reproductive labor, which is typically performed in the home by women, is affected by the “invasion” of work into the domestic sphere.

• Recommendations and Conclusions

In my concluding remarks, I explore potential solutions to these home/work conflicts, using the lens of time reckoning. I argue that interactive agencies should abandon the use of time tracking and billing by the hour. I also suggest that agencies create clear policies around the use of mobile technologies and the negotiation of private time. Finally, I suggest that interactive agencies should also acknowledge the supporting role domestic, reproductive labor plays in their organization, even if it is done by their workers’ partners. I finally recommend that interactive agency workers collectively negotiate resistance strategies, based on their need for private time.

Because it’s not a random survey, you can forward this to anyone you know. But you will only be able to take this survey once! So make it count!

http://www.yorku.ca/surveys/survey.php?sid=247

The goal of this survey is simply to ask more people about their working time experience than typical qualitative research allows. Having completed 20 in-depth interviews, it is now time to have shorter but better informed questions for you.

I value your participation! It is entirely confidential and voluntary. I will not share your data with anyone except in aggregate form.