Research project AP/21 (Research action AP)
More and more people complain about time pressure and time scarcity. Our options are increasing, but the days never last longer than 24 hours. In addition, individual time use is part of a complex interplay of the time use of other individuals, families, work organizations, shops and services … Different time structures can collide and cause traffic jams, noise at night, problems in the quest for childcare, resentment when trying to correspond leisure time and work agendas … Because of these conflicts time also creates inequalities between men and women, between workers and retired people, between parents and children, between workers with normal time schedules and the ones with flexible working hours ... This sophisticated choreography hardly gets directed; there is no minister of time structuring, the government has no real time policy.
In the past decades, partly as a result of changes undermining the industrial structure of time and the structure of fixed times, the need for a conscious and planned time structuring has sharply increased in most Western countries. This is the main reason why so many local and regional initiatives and projects on the structuring of time have arisen in most European countries (among others in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany) in the past 15 years. It is remarkable that in Belgium so little is happening in this area. We can hardly speak of an integrated time policy in our country and also the amount of local initiatives on time structuring and time policy is very limited here. That is why the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office decided on demand of the Government Service for Sustainable Development to finance a research project on this topic in the program “Action in support of the Federal Authority’s strategic priorities.”
The aim of this (short-term) project is:
(1) to identify and analyze a number of dominant societal time problems based on time budget data, on the public debate on this theme in media and international scientific literature, and on a number of interviews with privileged witnesses and experts (see task 1.1)
(2) to examine a number of European initiatives concerning the structuring of time that anticipate on the earlier identified problems (see task 1.2)
(3) to find out to what extent foreign initiatives, aimed at the solution of the earlier identified time related problems, can be implemented in Belgium (see task 1.3).
Lessen voor een Belgisch tijdsbeleid. Een analyse van Europese initiatieven rond tijdsordening : eindrapport
Brussel : Federaal Wetenschapsbeleid, 2007 (SP1807)
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