Abstract
(1) Background: Work hours are the basic carrier impacting employees’ work–life experience and organizational performance, and employees have greater anxiety in relation to work hours as new technology requires an increasingly faster work rhythm. However, scientific research on this topic lags far behind the practice, calling to attention the need for research on work hours from the perspective of historical evolution; (2) Methods: The Bibliometric method is used to analyze the 6364 articles and their contained 77 high-frequency keywords related to work hours from the Web of Science published between 1901 and 2017. Additionally, an individual–organization–society integrative perspective was adopted to describe the map changes and theme evolution of work hours; (3) Results and conclusions: The hot spots of research at the organizational level changed significantly around 1990, with the theme of “long work hours” becoming the core issue in recent years. Studies on the individual level have gradually moved from physiological aspects to the issues of burnout and psychological distress. Research topics related to the social level are somewhat loose, and mainly focused on work–life conflict areas. In addition, the cluster analysis based on the high-frequency keywords classifies six research types according to their research themes. Based on these findings, future trends are proposed to provide theoretical and practical reference for future studies.
Highlights
Work hours are a time-honored concept serving as an important instrument for valuing commodities because of work hours’ identity and measurability
Shi compared work-hour variation tendencies for employees over 50 years old in Belgium, France, Germany and The Netherlands, from 1997 to 2011 [18]. These studies focused only on the specific number of work-hours changes, and failed to describe the research theme change on the map of work hours from an evolutionary aspect, let alone depict the evolutionary process of work hours. By directly assessing these aspects of work hours, this paper presents the development posture and the future course of the research on work hours based on prior studies
The co-word analysis method is a form of content analysis consisting of a co-word matrix which uses a statistic on occurrence frequency between particular keywords in the same object to reveal the affinity between the keywords and to analyze the subject and theme-structure changes [19]
Summary
Work hours are a time-honored concept serving as an important instrument for valuing commodities because of work hours’ identity and measurability. Indexes related to time, such as “being late”, “early retreat” and “absence”, are used to judge individual performance [1]. Since a reasonable work schedule could powerfully ensure particular organizational performance [2,3], the controversial concept of work hours between organizations and individuals has been proposed. Work hours unboundedly, so as to obtain more surplus value. The “theory X” proposed by Douglas McGregor suggests that organizations should push or force individuals to work for organizational goals because individuals’ only motivation is to obtain economic rewards [4]
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