ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the individual experience of time and how this is affected by membership of an occupational group with its own particular way of coping with the temporal demands of work. It takes as its starting-point psychological studies of temporal structure. The nature of these temporal demands affects occupational groups' differing mental constructions concerning time. Organizations manage time scarcity in differing ways that impact on individual experience which is mediated by membership of a particular occupational group. These groups negotiate about time, seeking to impose their definitions of the best ways of organizing time on other interest groups. One of the most important psychological theories about the experience of time was put forward by Ornstein. As an alternative to the concept of a biological clock as a measure of the perception of duration he suggested an information-processing approach according to which duration was related to the size of the memory store used in the encoding of information.
