24 X 7: CULTURE OR MANAGEMENT?

[Stanley]

24 X 7: CULTURE OR MANAGEMENT?

8 July 2004

One of the interesting things about discussions involving disparate views is that they throw up questions and ideas that on first sight have little to do with the original subject but on closer examination prove that the linkages are sound. The subject of the ‘24X7’ lifestyle arose during a debate on the oneguy site about the North/South Divide, whether it really existed and if so what it was. One of the differences noted was that the further south you go, the more likely you are to meet this phenomenon in everyday life. I decided I wanted to look more closely at this.
The context in which this was originally cited was one where in certain areas, amenities and services could be found which never close. You can go to petrol stations, supermarkets and other retail establishments which are always open. On the face of it, the ultimate in convenience, they are there whenever you want them. Many telephone and online services work on the same principle and with the onset of globalisation and communications across time zones this has become more common.
This isn’t new, some services like police, fire and medical assistance have always been 24X7. Utilities like gas, electricity and water/sewage services have to be available all the time. Some industrial processes, by their very nature, cannot be stopped, like continuous iron smelting or steel making. Since the dawn of industrial evolution manufacturers have known that keeping an expensive asset like a large factory running 24 hours of the day was an economic use of capital as long as the additional labour costs of unsocial hours didn’t cancel out the benefit of spreading fixed costs.
What is new I think is the social and cultural acceptance of ‘The Twenty Four Hour Society’ in the sense that apart from the benefits in time flexibility to the consumer because of the possibility of instant gratification at any time of the day or night, a society or culture running like this is seen to be more vibrant and energetic. It never sleeps and therefore it must be an improvement.
There is of course a fundamental flaw in the concept once we translate it from management of an asset or service to a culture. Human beings may fool themselves for a time that they can function 24X7 but their bodies will eventually tell them otherwise! We all need sleep and whilst we can cheat our body clocks temporarily at weekends we are soon brought to heel by exhaustion or even illness. Perhaps 24X7 isn’t quite as good a thing culturally as it’s cracked up to be.
Let’s come at this from a different direction, adopt my favourite tactic and look at history. Since the dawn of time human life has been ruled by the sun, when it rose enough to give light we woke and when the light failed we slept. Some extension of this time in winter was possible by the use of crude indoor lighting or the light from the cooking fire but essentially we were ruled by the sun. The only exception to this was the period around the full moon when cloud conditions allowed enough light to function out of doors. We have all heard the phrase ‘Hunter’s Moon’. The famous Lunar Society in Birmingham was so called because the night of the full moon was a convenient time for the participants to travel of an evening. As late as 1930 I have evidence that people in Thornton visited relations in Earby at the full moon for the same reason, it wasn’t until the advent of efficient vehicle lights and economical street lighting that this changed. During the ‘blackout’ in WW2 nobody ventured out of doors during darkness unless they had to do. Anyone who has been in large cities at night knows that night has been turned into day, even our major motorways near cities are lit all night.
Our concept of time has changed. In agrarian or peasant societies there was no need for timepieces, the sun was your clock and once a week the church bells would remind you it was Sunday, the day of rest and worship. The advent of the Factory System necessitated the imposition of time discipline on the workers and the earliest factories borrowed from the church and had bells to summon the workers. Later, steam whistles were used. The ‘knocker-up’ with his long cane with stiff wires on the end was employed to rattle the bedroom windows to let you know another day was about to dawn. In summer he was redundant, the sun woke his clients but in winter when the workers were fighting nature and couldn’t afford an alarm clock he was essential.
By 1850 the Magnetic Telegraph Company were laying telegraph lines throughout the country and their first customers were the railways who needed a standard time in order to function efficiently. The first ‘accurate’ clocks were those on railway stations which were corrected each day by telegraphic signal. By 1870 the Post Office had its own telegraph system for communications and another public clock appeared in the post office window, also regulated by telegraph. There was a problem here in the early days in that railway time did not always agree with post office time. As late as 1902 the Calf Hall Shed Company in Barnoldswick was forced to accede to a request from their tenants to run to post office time and not railway time as there was a four minute discrepancy between the two. The engineer’s clock in the engine house was set to railway time as noted by the Manchester Man each day. The workers used the post office clock to set their watches and the result was that they were coming in to work late every morning. The advent of radio in the 1930s solved the accuracy problem once and for all because the radio broadcasts were timed using the Greenwich Time Signal which was by then the world standard.
It is salutary to note here that in the days of unreliable timepieces punctuality was king. There was a saying that ‘Punctuality was the politeness of princes and the courtesy of kings’. My own jaundiced view is that these days we all have timepieces on our wrists that would have occupied two rooms in Manchester University in 1948, despite this, punctuality has become a very old-fashioned concept.
We seem to be straying into the area of time management here and I don’t think that this is any accident. There is a connection between the advent of 24X7 culture and ‘efficient’ use of time, to my mind this is where it starts to get interesting. The advocates of the Twenty Four Hour society tell us that it has great advantages, it gives us freedom to manage our time to suit us best, it extends choice in that more venues are open. We are no longer confined to the rigid structure of opening and closing times. The question then arises, why do we need this ‘Freedom’ and ‘Choice’? How did we manage before we got it?
When I was a lad (a dreaded phrase I know!) bread, milk, papers and tobacco were available from six in the morning to cater for the early risers. Shops stayed open all day and the majority closed at half past five or six at the latest. It was possible for a working mother to purchase food on her way home from the factory. Fish and chip shops opened for tea from four until six and then again for supper from eight until perhaps eleven o’clock. Friday night was a late shopping night and on Sundays everything was closed. The vast majority of workers were out of work by five o’clock and not in again until early in the morning. Most of them lived within walking distance of their work and passed the shops on the way home. In those days there were numerous ‘corner shops’ which often stayed open slightly later to cope with the evening trade.
The introduction of commuting to work, unsocial hours and shift working smashed this system. The first place it crumbled was in the large towns but eventually it reached backwaters like Barnoldswick. Even here we can now do our grocery shopping until ten o’clock at night. The day of the corner shop has gone under the onslaught of the supermarket price wars. The general impression the consumer gained from these changes was that the pace of life was increasing. They were quite right, the question I want to address now is who was driving the increase in pace and why?
I’ve always been interested in systems of management. I think I might have invented one or two of my own, my favourite is ‘Wall of Death’ management. This posits that, like the man on the motor-bike on the Wall of Death, as long as you keep going like hell you won’t fall off. Another is ‘Management by Attrition’. I first identified this one when I came into contact with corporate culture in the 1980s. It seemed to me that the firm that I was working with had decided that the best route to increased profitability was to cut down on the numbers of middle management but not their functions and get more work out of them. They also introduced ‘Flexitime’ for the workers which actually resulted in them working more hours because they didn’t want to be seen by the management going home early. The net result was an initial rise in production per man hour but an eventual increase in sick leave, burn out and staff turnover as the faster pace took its toll. Everyone was very cagey if asked questions about the affect on long term productivity and profits.
I suspect that this shift to more aggressive styles of management is closely related to the growth of the 24X7 culture. As in manufacturing industry, 24X7 management of an investment like a supermarket or petrol station theoretically leads to greater profit but only if accompanied by a relaxation in regulation of working hours and payment for unsocial hours, not necessarily an extension of the night workers choice.
Another factor enters the equation here and it’s an important one. We are incapable of running stable economies or businesses with zero growth. Modern economies have to increase output year on year and in order to do this consumption has to be stimulated by advertising. Before the consumer society the manufacturers who were putting yarn out to independent hand loom weavers in their homes had a big problem in times of high demand. The price of the cloth rose, the weavers made more money per piece and once they had earned enough money for their needs they stopped working, they called it Saint Monday. The cure for this was the factory system and the discipline was to set wage levels at a point where the workers were permanently short of money and had to comply with factory discipline to survive. Once advertising and technology created increased demand for goods consumption rose and wage rates advanced enough to keep consumption growing. In order to get consumption beyond the barrier of necessities we had to be convinced that we needed products that would otherwise never have existed. We have reached the stage now where a person’s position in society is measured by their ability to consume.
What I am suggesting is that we have been sold a pup. ‘24X7 culture’ is not consumer choice, it is management of consumers. Complicated entities like a large retail chain and its supply lines work better if they never stop and sales keep rising. This applies even more strongly in the case of shopping malls and hypermarkets. Suppose you can convince the consumer that shopping 24X7 is freedom, is exciting and even in some cases where they run ‘singles nights’, is a route to love and sexual satisfaction? Did we really demand the demise of the corner shop and the ability to buy ‘fresh’ salad from Africa and onions from New Zealand? Would we all have starved without Sunday shopping? Who first coined the phrase ‘retail therapy’?
I believe that we are victims here. In order to produce greater profits economies of scale were needed. Once this parameter had been raised 24X7 was seen as an advantage because the expensive investment could run more efficiently. The net result has been an increase in the pace of life which may seem exciting and new at first but eventually becomes the norm. The result is actually less leisure time not more as the evangelists would have us believe. Instead of relaxing with a book we are watching the advertisements on TV and then going out to the supermarket to buy whatever has been sublimated into our brains.
Why am I so sure of this? If retirement has taught me anything it is that true freedom is the ability to manage time to suit yourself. This isn’t flexitime, it’s Mytime! There you are, a new word for the language, you saw it here first. Mytime is not going shopping at midnight in the hopes of meeting a woman, it’s shopping when the weather and time of day suits, usually early in the morning. It’s the ability to say, sod it, I’ll do nothing today but read. I know this isn’t possible when you have to do a job during the day but it is the situation you should be aiming for. The last thing this perfect lifestyle needs is a 24X7 culture and that’s what finally convinces me that what we are looking at is not client-led culture change but management of the consumer.

8 July 2004