The Overlap of Work on Personal Time of French Professionals and Managers
This article presents an overview of the phenomenon of informal work at home (i.e. the work done outside the usual, contractual place of work and also outside of normal working hours) using quantitative data collected by a French trade union based on a sample of more than one thousand managers and professionals. The data provide information about the extent of the phenomenon and some of its determinants. Our research model proposes the following three hypotheses: Sociodemographic variables influence informal work at home. More specifically, young people (H1a), woman (H1b) and parents (H1c) tend to work more during their personal time; Work characteristics influence informal work at home. More specifically, heavy workload (H2a), management responsibilities (H2b) and frequent business travels (H2c), are positively associated with informal work at home; Information and communication technologies amplify informal work at home. Our results indicate that more than half of the participants work at home a few hours per week and more than one third part do so on a regular basis. Contrary to our hypotheses, informal work at home is positively associated with age, whereas it is not correlated with gender. Regression analyses indicate that workload, frequent business travels and the multiplication of information and communication technologies tend to increase the frequency of informal work at home. Our results illustrate the reorganization of working time associated with the emergence of post-Fordist production models, which have led, among other things, to greater porosity between working time and non-working time.