Who works when? Towards a typology of weekly work patterns in Belgium

Abstract

The question when people work is almost always reduced to the question how much people work on (non-)standard working hours. In this contribution, we applied optimal matching techniques using Belgian data from a weekly work grid (n ¼ 6330) to identify individuals' work timing patterns, offering a richer analytical approach than most previous studies on (non-)standard work time. Results show that such analysis captures much more and much more relevant variation in the timing of work than simple questions. Three general and 10 more detailed weekly work patterns are identified based on two dimensions of paid work: the number of hours worked and the percentage of hours worked on non-standard periods of time. Additional analyses show that men's work patterns depend only on job characteristics. For women, work patterns are also explained by socioeconomic factors including education, presence of working partner and presence of children.

Daily Temporal Pathways: A Latent Class Approach to Time Diary Data

“…Our research is most similar to the work of researchers using sequence analysis (Glorieux et al 2008, 2010; Hellgren 2014; Lesnard 2004, 2008; Lesnard and de Saint Pol 2009; Lesnard and Kan 2011; Minnen et al 2015). Like these scholars, we use the detailed activity data available from time diaries to analyze sequences of activities.…”

“…Time diary data have the capacity to give us insight into issues such as the timing, sequence, and interdependence of activities. These features of the data have only begun to be analyzed by researchers (Glorieux et al 2008, 2010; Hellgren 2014; Lesnard 2004, 2008; Lesnard and de Saint Pol 2009; Lesnard and Kan 2011; Minnen et al 2015). Our research as well as this recent line of inquiry takes a more holistic approach and considers the composition of days, recognizing that individuals are purposeful actors even if they are operating within structures that limit or constrain their abilities to be agentic.…”

“…Though women have more leisure episodes than men, the leisure episode of the longest duration for women is shorter, on average, than men’s longest leisure episode; women’s leisure episodes are also more likely to be accompanied by unpaid work (Bittman and Wajcman 2000). The timing and sequence approach considers the overlap/non-overlap between work schedules (Lesnard 2004, 2008), typical work patterns (Glorieux et al 2008; Hellgren 2014; Lesnard and de Saint Pol 2009; Lesnard and Kan 2011; Minnen et al 2015), and leisure patterns (Glorieux et al 2010) to understand what and for whom different sequencing patterns exist.…”

How the type of working day affects work–life balance and mealtime balance: A study based on the time use survey

“…An institutionalist approach points to contextual factors to explain the different developments that have taken place in the organisation of working time, both in general terms and, more specifically, in the differences in the time that women and men devote to paid work and to meeting family needs (Altuzarra et al, 2018; Minnen et al, 2016; Moreno-Colom, 2017). In order to try to resolve these conflicts between roles, Europe’s welfare societies have introduced what some authors call a ‘gender social contract’ (Torns, 2015: 280), with part-time work as an alternative formula for work that allows for balance.…”

The Autonomy Paradox: How Night Work Undermines Subjective Well-Being of Internet-Based Freelancers

“…We construct a quasi-continuous measure of the share of night hours within an individual's overall workload by dividing the number of night slots (1, 2, or 3) by the whole number of selected slots, thus measuring night shift of work. A similar approach (with percentage of work performed during nonstandard periods) was used by Minnen, Glorieux, and van Tienoven (2016).…”