Temporal strategies and fear in the workplace

Abstract

The contemporary workplace appears to be a prime source of fear for many Australians. Over the course of the last decade, large-scale workplace change has rendered many workers redundant, leaving them with the problem of working out who they are and what they are to do in the future. I suggest in this article that such changes have increased workers’ awareness of time, and that they, either implicitly or explicitly, use this awareness to manage their levels of fear and anxiety. Using empirical material from an in-depth experiential study of a small group of workers who had survived large-scale downsizing, I outline two different kinds of temporal strategy, or ways of manipulating the subjective experience of time, that these workers appear to engage in as a way of minimizing felt levels of fear and anxiety. Whilst these strategies seem to be successful in minimizing the emotional impact of workplace change, some evidence suggests that these strategies as coping mechanisms may, in the longer term, reduce levels of workplace engagement and social connection.