ABSTRACT
With changes in working time policies, notable changes in actual working hours have occurred, and the extent and scope of these changes are increasingly complex. While national average figures on the length of working hours suggest a rather stable or moderate declining trend in the 1990s in many industrialized countries, significant changes are found in the distribution of individual working hours. From a comparative perspective, there are considerable differences across countries in the way working hours are distributed among workers. In some countries, working hours are so varied among individual workers that virtually no ‘standard’ or ‘normal’ working hours can be identified. Certainly, this change was induced to varying degrees by workers’ diversifying needs and preferences. Yet it is in this process of diversification where the gaps between actual and preferred working hours have been most clearly revealed.
