Call for Papers
Co-editors (all members of the Work Time Reduction Research Network (www.WTR-RN.com): Daiga Kamerāde (University of Salford), Agnieszka Piasna (ETUI), Wen Fan (Boston College), Brendan Burchell (University of Cambridge).
The reduction of working time has received increased attention from researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and the public. It is likely to be a crucial component of the future of work, as technological change and artificial intelligence disrupt previous labour regimes, raising concerns of technological unemployment, rising inequalities, and social unrest. Growing environmental concerns and demographic challenges call for new, more sustainable ways of organising economic activity and challenge the viability of current models of time organisation at the levels of society, family, and individuals.
Proposals to reduce working hours without a (proportional) reduction in wages are notable not least because they have the potential to improve the quality of life at work and beyond. They also signal an important step towards rethinking and redefining the boundaries of time dedicated to paid work, as well as what is regarded as standard working time in contemporary capitalist societies. The working week, organised around 5 days of 8 hours each, has become established over the last century as a reference point for the organisation of work and non-work life and has had a knock-on effect on the temporal organisation of societies and economies. The increasing flexibilisation and fragmentation of work and employment systems have disrupted the working time model inherited from the industrial era but have not replaced it with a new and shared norm. Time is thus a contested terrain, its duration and organisation being reshaped by the forces of economic competition and technological change, and renegotiated by workers and employers through collective disputes, individualised solutions or regulation.
Against this background, working time reduction offers an important opportunity to explore how time can be imagined and organised differently, at the intersection of paid work and other spheres of life, and in employment and organisational models. Proposals to reduce working time, including various initiatives to experiment with its different design and implementation, thus confront a fundamental challenge to how we currently organise society around time, with its division into working and non-working time.
As scholars at the centre of working time reduction, including the four-day week, research, we have been impressed by the range of studies either in progress or completed. We are proposing a Special Issue on Working Time Reduction to bring this research together. We hope it will set out what we already know, how new findings are affecting scholars’ understandings of time, and what research agendas going forward should emphasise.
We envision a multi-disciplinary set of authors from economics, sociology, geography, business, psychology, and political science, among other fields. (We are open to contributions from historians and anthropologists, for example.) We encourage empirical and theoretical contributions.
The focus of the papers should fit within the scope of Time & Society and be centred on time and time use. List of topics (not exhaustive):
- How work time reduction impacts the meaning and value of time and work
- Reimagining working time for a sustainable economy
- How working and family or personal life are organised around time in todays’ society
- How time can be negotiated and scheduled differently in the organisation of work
- New models of organising and thinking about time at work, with a focus on reduced working hours
- Policy and practice of reduced working time
- How different cultural understandings of time and time ownership influence approaches to work time reduction
Submission of abstracts and bio notes:
The abstracts should be 150-250 (max) words long.
In the abstract, please state aims of the article and clearly articulate its contribution to time studies, and (as far as possible) approach time as an analytical question.
Together with an abstract, please submit authors’ short bio notes and current affiliation.
Please submit your abstracts to: apiasna@etui.org and ib483@cam.ac.uk.
Timeline:
Deadline for abstract submission: 7 April 2025. Decisions notification: 1 May 2025.
Deadline for submission of full articles: 31 December 2025.
Acceptance of an abstract does not guarantee publication. Final acceptance will depend on the journal agreeing to proceed with the Special Issue once the editors see the list of abstracts and the outcome of the peer-review process according to the journal’s policies. Articles will be sent for peer review upon submission, so we encourage early submission, well before the final deadline. Once accepted for publication, articles will be published online first.