Working At Night : : The Temporal Organisation of Labour Across Political and Economic Regimes / / ed. by Lucie Dušková, Ger Duijzings.

• MitwirkendeR: Ahlheim, Hannah,; Duijzings, Ger,; Dušková, Lucie,; Fina, Rosa Maria,; Karaseva, Asya,; Kenny, Bridget,; Kumar, Arun,; Lalvani, Simiran,; Momzikova, Maria,; Müller, Malte,; Paris, Antoine,; Peters, Anja Katharina,; Rákosník, Jakub,
• HerausgeberIn: Duijzings, Ger,; Dušková, Lucie,
• Place / Publishing House: München ;, Wien : : De Gruyter Oldenbourg, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (VI, 273 p.)

The night represents almost universally a special, liminal or "out of the ordinary" temporal zone with its own meanings, possibilities and dangers, and political, cultural, religious and social implications. Only in the modern era was the night systematically "colonised" and nocturnal activity "normalised," in terms of (industrial) labour and production processes. Although the globalised 24/7 economy is usually seen as the outcome of capitalist modernisation, development and expansion starting in the late nineteenth century, other consecutive and more recent political and economic systems adopted perpetual production systems as well, extending work into the night and forcing workers to work the "night shift," normalising it as part of an alternative non-capitalist modernity. This volume draws attention to the extended work hours and night shift work, which have remained underexplored in the history of labour and the social science literature. By describing and comparing various political and economic "regimes," it argues that, from the viewpoint of global labour history, night labour and the spread of 24/7 production and services should not be seen, only and exclusively, as an epiphenomenon of capitalist production, but rather as one of the outcomes of industrial modernity.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- 1 Introduction -- Prologue: Towards Normalisation of Night Work? -- 2 “. . . Working Night and Day” Working at Night as a Metaphor in Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians -- Agrarian Societies/Early Industrialism -- 3 The Nights of Bombay Workers (1870–1920) -- 4 Nightwork in Lisbon (1890–1915) -- Liberal Market Economies -- 5 Night Work Restrictions in Interwar Czechoslovakia (1918–1938) -- 6 Disrupted Times: Continuous Shift Workers in Societal and Sociological Debates Between Boom and Crisis (1945–1975) -- 7 “Enter the World of Danger, Drama and Death!”: The Perception of the Night Nurse in Popular Fiction (1970s–1990s) -- Authoritarianism -- 8 “Threatening Our Home Life”: Shop Hours and White Women Retail Workers’ Struggles Around Evening Hours in Johannesburg South Africa (1908–1960s) -- 9 The Socialist Image of the Night Shift and Its Practices (1945–1966) -- Global Capitalism of the Twenty-First Century -- 10 Not Only Night Work: Time Difference, National Power-Geometry and Night Communications in Contemporary Far-Eastern Russia -- 11 Delivering the Night-Time Economy Home: Nocturnal Labour and Temporalities of Platform Work -- Epilogue: Sleeping at Night? -- 12 Expanding the Limits. Towards a History of Working and Waking in Modern Societies -- List of Contributors