ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the attitudes to work and time of people in ‘traditional’ or pre-industrial societies who still retain a large measure of control over the rhythms of their working lives. For such people, time is intrinsic to the array of specific tasks that make up the pattern of quotidian activity of a community. The chapter shows how the formal logic of capitalist production undermines this task-orientation by establishing an absolute division, in principle, between the domains of work and social life. There is an intimate logical connection between the form of time and the estimation of work in terms of the generalised concept of labour. The individual is supposedly caught in a perpetual oscillation between work in the public domain of production and leisure in the private domain of consumption. The chapter draws on some studies of one particular category of industrial workers, namely locomotive drivers.
