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Work Time

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Synonyms

Hours of work

Definition

Working time refers to the time people spend in paid employment. This includes work undertaken not only in the workplace but also in other locations (e.g., from home). It can be measured over quite short periods, such as a day or a week, or over much longer periods, like a year or even a lifetime.

A key determinant of variations across individuals in working time when measured over years and lifetimes is unemployment and other episodes of joblessness. While it is well established that unemployment has harmful consequences for a host of different quality of life measures, this is not the focus of this contribution. Instead, the focus here is on within-job variations in working time, as typically measured by variations in the number of hours worked per week.

There is also considerable variation across individuals in the times during the day and week when those hours are worked. This reflects the incidence of both shift work and so-called nonstandard work...

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Correspondence to Mark Wooden .

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© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Wooden, M. (2014). Work Time. In: Michalos, A.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0753-5_3262

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0753-5_3262

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