Post-industrial convergence in time allocation

Developed societies, it is argued, are in a number of respects, and for very clear reasons, becoming more similar to each other in their patterns of daily life. This article shows, using time budget evidence, a rather striking multinational convergence in the broad balance between leisure and work. But first it introduces a model of development, one specifically connected with the historical evolution of time use, a model that takes labour (and consumption) time as its central variables, but which owes more to Thorstein Veblen than to Karl Marx.     

Post-Industrial Society: The myth of the service economy

There is a popular view of the current pattern of change in developed societies, a view typified by Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, that recent economic growth has been increasingly concentrated in the collective provision of services rather than in individual consumption of material goods, and that this change of economic focus from goods to services is a trend which will continue into the future. The author argues, using UK data, that the trend is in fact away from the expenditure on services and towards expenditure on goods. The growing employment in the tertiary sector, previously used as an indicator of the growth of the service economy, emerges here as a manifestation of the division of labour—a process which increases the efficiency of production of material goods—while the final production of services, using automatic machinery and “direct labour”, will increasingly take place in the home.     

The informal economy: Its role in post-industrial society

This article continues a line of argument, initiated in Futures¹, suggesting that a wide range of services which were once produced in the money economy are increasingly provided informally—on a self-service basis. The informal economy contains a diverse collection of activities that may be divided into three categories: the household, the communal, and the underground. This last in turn covers a wide range, from outright theft, to tax evasion and moonlighting. Government taxation and welfare policies, changes in lifestyles, and the self-service economy combine to make the informal economy a sector of growing importance. Governments have three options: they can ignore the informal economy, suppress it, or exploit it. The last appears preferable, but would require some initiatives from the state.     

Time Budgets,Life Histories and Social Position

This paper falls into two parts. It has an initial brief theoretical discussion of the use of well structured short- and long-term narrative accounts of individuals' life experiences (respectively time-diary and work/life histories) in establishing the extent of their personal resources, and hence, ultimately, their social position. The second section discusses the development of a new social-positional indicator (currently called the Interim Essex Score or IES), and illustrates its use in an investigation of the consequences of women's career breaks on their subsequent levels of access to economic resources.     

New technology—what new jobs?

Does technological innovation lead to an overall reduction in jobs? The literature of Kondratiev ‘long waves’ helps in understanding why the employment consequences of technical change may vary over time. This article applies the technique of ‘technological mapping’ in the context of ‘long wave’ arguments to indicate prospects for the longer term employment.     

Time Use and the Dynamics of the Service Sector

This article looks cat the historical dynamics of service provision from a rather unusual perspective - the change in patterns of time use. It discusses a mechanism whereby activity potterns in ‘the economy ‘may be accountedfor in terms of time rather than money, and shows how this form of economic activity is associated with other rextra-economic 3 sorts of productive and leisure activities. It presents time-budget d0ta from a number of different developed economies, showing historical changes in time allocation patterns, and relates these to more conventional indicators of economic structure.     

Scenarios of world development

This article looks at 16 recent studies of global futures and examines their conclusions within a sociopolitical framework.² Three idealised worldviews—conservative, reformist, radical—are constructed from this framework; they are then married with a classification based upon the two parameters of high growth-low growth and equality-inequality. This allows for the concise mapping of existing scenarios and, by the elucidation of the major differences in sociopolitical forecasts, provides a simple but effective technique for comparative analysis. Two quality-of-life issues, the future of work, and of political development and change, are used as concrete examples of how the method can be used to create a series of scenarios which cover the whole socio-political spectrum of alternative futures.     

Social innovation : Change in the mode of provision of services

This paper discusses a particular sort of social innovation: the development of new modes of provision of services for households. It argues that technical and organisational change in the process of service delivery may crucially determine both the sectoral structure of developed economies, and their patterns of time use. The model of service innovation described here provides historical insights, and an analytical framework for considering the likely impact of telematics technologies on future industrial employment patterns.