Working At Night: The Temporal Organisation of Labour Across Political and Economic Regimes

Open Access Published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg 2022

Working At Night

The Temporal Organisation of Labour Across Political and Economic Regimes

Edited by: Ger Duijzings and Lucie Dušková

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753592

Overview
Contents

About this book

Open Access

The night represents almost universally a special, liminal or "out of the ordinary" temporal zone with its own meanings, possibilities and dangers, and political, cultural, religious and social implications. Only in the modern era was the night systematically "colonised" and nocturnal activity "normalised," in terms of (industrial) labour and production processes. Although the globalised 24/7 economy is usually seen as the outcome of capitalist modernisation, development and expansion starting in the late nineteenth century, other consecutive and more recent political and economic systems adopted perpetual production systems as well, extending work into the night and forcing workers to work the "night shift," normalising it as part of an alternative non-capitalist modernity. This volume draws attention to the extended work hours and night shift work, which have remained underexplored in the history of labour and the social science literature. By describing and comparing various political and economic "regimes," it argues that, from the viewpoint of global labour history, night labour and the spread of 24/7 production and services should not be seen, only and exclusively, as an epiphenomenon of capitalist production, but rather as one of the outcomes of industrial modernity.　

Author / Editor information

Lucie Dušková, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic/University of Leizpig; Ger Duijzings, University of Regensburg.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	V
1 Introduction Ger Duijzings and Lucie Dušková Open Access Download PDF	1
Prologue: Towards Normalisation of Night Work?
2 “. . . Working Night and Day” Working at Night as a Metaphor in Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians Antoine Paris Open Access Download PDF	23
Agrarian Societies/Early Industrialism
3 The Nights of Bombay Workers (1870–1920) Arun Kumar Open Access Download PDF	45
4 Nightwork in Lisbon (1890–1915) Rosa Maria Fina Open Access Download PDF	69
Liberal Market Economies
5 Night Work Restrictions in Interwar Czechoslovakia (1918–1938) Jakub Rákosník Open Access Download PDF	85
6 Disrupted Times: Continuous Shift Workers in Societal and Sociological Debates Between Boom and Crisis (1945–1975) Malte Müller Open Access Download PDF	105
7 “Enter the World of Danger, Drama and Death!”: The Perception of the Night Nurse in Popular Fiction (1970s–1990s) Anja Katharina Peters Open Access Download PDF	131
Authoritarianism
8 “Threatening Our Home Life”: Shop Hours and White Women Retail Workers’ Struggles Around Evening Hours in Johannesburg South Africa (1908–1960s) Bridget Kenny Open Access Download PDF	155
9 The Socialist Image of the Night Shift and Its Practices (1945–1966) Lucie Dušková Open Access Download PDF	189
Global Capitalism of the Twenty-First Century
10 Not Only Night Work: Time Difference, National Power-Geometry and Night Communications in Contemporary Far-Eastern Russia Asya Karaseva and Maria Momzikova Open Access Download PDF	213
11 Delivering the Night-Time Economy Home: Nocturnal Labour and Temporalities of Platform Work Simiran Lalvani Open Access Download PDF	237
Epilogue: Sleeping at Night?
12 Expanding the Limits. Towards a History of Working and Waking in Modern Societies Hannah Ahlheim Open Access Download PDF	255
List of Contributors Open Access Download PDF	271

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
Audience: Scholars of social/labour history, anthropology, sociology, students
Pages
- Front matter: 6
- Main content: 273
Illustrations
- Coloured Illustrations: 4
- Tables: 1
Keywords: night shift work; industrial labour; labour history; modernity; 24/7.

eBook

Published: October 3, 2022
ISBN: 9783110753592

Hardcover

Published: October 3, 2022
ISBN: 9783110752885