Long working hours and working-time preferences: Between desirability and feasibility
通过深度定性访谈，发现长工时员工对工作时间偏好普遍存在矛盾心理，源于对减少工时的可行性存在多重且冲突的看法，建议结合定量与定性方法研究长工时成因。
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.