ILPC 2026

Most research treats time as little more than epiphenomenal to social change, a chronological register on a wall or a smartphone app, that helps us make sequential sense of the world. Arguably, every social and economic revolution has been about time directly, or has had deep implications for the way we think about it. Where the first agricultural revolution introduced social rhythms and rituals dependent on seemingly regular annual or seasonal cycles, the invention of the clock produced the reality of global synchronisation though longitude. The French Revolution led to infamous efforts to standardise time, followed more successfully by the scientific revolution embodied by Taylorism and the imperative to commodify time. The compression of time through technological revolution and globalisation has again radically changed how we think about time, prompting some to celebrate the emergence of ‘24/7 capitalism’ through the confluence of global supply, demand and constant production. Others suggest we now live in ‘liquid times’ (Bauman 2000), characterised by discourses of acceleration, flexibility and immediacy (Virilio, 2006), such that many work processes now occur at speeds and intensities that are beyond the capacities of individual consciousness (Urry and Johnson, 2005), often dissimulating the profound implications of these temporal changes for the social institution of work and the wellbeing of the worker (Hardt and Negri, 2000). The structure of work has changed profoundly, arguably more so than at any time in the course of human history. Where once the control and commodification of time provided the basis of organisation, now the nature of time itself has been altered – first compressed, then intensified and now stripped away - in a festival of flexibility.

Many extol the virtues of this temporal revolution - boundary-less work, the end of traditional careers, the flexible worker, but denying the temporal casualties of these portentions, manifest in a tacitly associated body of workers linked by the paradoxical manner in which work-time is compressed but time-work is all consuming. Time-work means labour that is not economically valued but essential to reproducing the semblances of institutional norms of continuity, stability and work coherence, but at the workers’ expense, reflecting changes in the wage relation and the socially necessary time needed to sustain a living. It demands new but very cost-effective temporal norms and disciplines - self-discipline, self-regulation – but by workers themselves. If, as Sharma (2015: 178) claims, ‘power coalesces temporally’ then we are required to think about time  differently, not as a resource but as a power relation, a form of temporal capital to which people have differentiated access on the basis of class and gender. It raises fundamental questions about the ethics of modern work and the effect of time-robbed institutions on social wellbeing, the impacts of living and working in multiple temporalities, navigating increasingly faint work-life boundaries, and what this means for those who lack temporal capital. Do we have a new temporal class? This paper is an attempt to explore this temporal landscape.