ABSTRACT
Until the second half of the twentieth century, work time arrangements and operating time arrangements that arc applied in work organizations can be characterized by a dichotomy: daytime work and irregular work and shift work. By far most employees living in the industrialized countries work in the daytime only. This not only means that they do their work from early in the morning until late in the afternoon, but also that they are off at the weekend. To many, a working day amounts to something like eight working hours. Many employed have the impression that this arrangement of work time (four hours in the morning, four hours in the afternoon, off work at the weekend) forms a “natural” or “normal” pattern. One glance at the history of work time arrangements (henceforth WTAs) in Western countries, however, shows that all kinds of variations have existed throughout the centuries and that the number of working hours per day and the number of working days per week have often been (much) larger (see e.g. Ruppert, 1953; Harmsen & Reinalda, 1975; Levitan & Belous, 1979; Scherrer, 1981). The five-day working week of around eight hours per day was not introduced on a large scale in most countries until the sixties.
