Long working hours and working-time preferences: Between desirability and feasibility

Studies of workers engaged in patterns of long working hours increasingly draw on working-time preference data from large-scale surveys, in particular data on the ‘match’ or ‘mismatch’ of current working hours and preferred working hours. These data are useful, but they are weakened by the common instability of answers to simple working-time preference questions. This article reviews the existing discussion of the causes and implications of this instability. It takes advantage of a small programme of in-depth qualitative interviews in order to examine more closely expressions of working-time preferences among long hours workers. The interview results reveal widespread ambivalence, linked to the fact that employees hold multiple, often conflicting ideas, in particular around the feasibility of a reduction in their working hours. The results point to the need for a careful combination of quantitative and qualitative methods in the study of the causes of long working hours.