Thinking Time Geography (Routledge Studies in Human Geography) by Ellegård Kajsa

Author:Ellegård, Kajsa [Ellegård, Kajsa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

6 Organization of production and work

Work in life and the work life

Two important and interrelated missions set up for time-geography by Hägerstrand (1974) are, first, to link the micro and macro levels without losing important information in the transition between the levels, and, second, to underline the indivisibility of individuals at the chosen level of investigation. This implies a need to increasingly bring the indivisibility of the individual, which ought to be self-evident on the micro level, into investigations of macro-level phenomena. Work might serve as a point of departure for linking the levels and identifying a point of intersection between them. Figures 6.1 and 6.2 illustrate a multidimensional way to look at the intersection between the macro and micro levels, with an indivisible working person as the linking point. In the figures, work is regarded from three perspectives: the production organization (Figure 6.1 , upper part), the individual (Figure 6.1 , lower part) and the population perspectives respectively (at the bottom of Figure 6.2 ; compare it to Figure 4.4 ).

The production perspective of work goes from the national macro level, with its production and service industries (primary, secondary and tertiary industries), via an industrial branch (here, the metal industry) and a company (an automobile firm), into its production units (factories owned by the firm). On the industry and branch level, the statistics on industrial production of a nation may serve as a source. At the company level, information can be collected from the annual reports, while information about production units requires interviews and site visits.

In a lifetime perspective, the person illustrating the individual level works from 16 until 65 years of age. In a year perspective, the individual works for about 11 months, in a week perspective he works for five days and, finally, in the day perspective, for about eight hours. These simplifications give the impression that the time for private life activities increases the shorter the time perspective of a person’s life. This is, of course, not true, since the whole working life consists of workdays (eight hours for work) and weekends and holidays with (ideally) no work activities, but when changing timescale some simplifications are necessary. This is an example of how to bring conditions of a short time perspective over to longer time perspectives, having in mind that there is time free from work when a person is in the labor force. The approach resembles that taken by Hägerstrand to retain important micro-level information about the indivisible individual when talking about phenomena at the macro level, which is indicated in another way in Figure 4.4 .

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