Winding Down the Workday: Zoning the Evening Hours in Paris, Oslo, and San Francisco

Abstract

This article explores the subtle yet far-reaching ways that cultural environments shape the uses of the evening hours among business professionals in three countries. Drawing on interviews with professional men and women living and working in Paris, Oslo, and San Francisco from a spectrum of professional fields and employers, the article explores their evening routines. Three contrasting patterns are identified. Where the early evening hours between 17:00 and 21:00 are concerned, French, Norwegian, and American professionals traverse different cultural terrains. The French professionals and their employers treat this temporal zone as a status-conferring period. Adhering to a transorganizational cultural convention defining the early evening as work time, they use these hours to distinguish themselves as committed practioners of their metier equipped with status and authority. In Norway, comparable professionals approach this period as nonwork time off limits to their employer. Early departures from the office are encouraged and facilitated in the Norwegian workplace. Among the American professionals far less uniformity prevails among the evening routines of respondents working in different organizations and occupations. This variability is explained by the absence of the higher-level temporal conventions present in the two European contexts. In the American setting two deciding factors come into play: the temporal expectations of the professional’s employer and the bargaining power wielded by the individual professional vis-a-vis this employer. These differences between the evening routines of the three groups reflect important cultural differences across countries with broadly similar postindustrial landscapes.