Temporal materiality: Labour time, labour process and services

Time as an aspect of labour processes in services has not been discussed in the growing literatures on time in Marx’s critique of political economy and time in capitalism. Some research in the sociology of service work investigates work hours and schedules but rarely interprets temporal processes with reference to the labour theory of value and underestimates how capitalism has transformed time. This article integrates those literatures and examines three service temporalities – unbounded salary work, fragmented hourly wage work, and project- or task-specific independent contracting, arguing that time is integral to capital accumulation in services. Today’s temporally dynamic political economy of services remains clock-time oriented and productivist, like manufacturing, but what became relatively predictable and unifying collective rhythms are with services more variable, unpredictable and, arguably, disunifying.