Time with No Time

Time, especially the modern clock, was elemental in setting social relationships in modernity, in particular as regards the rationales and praxis of wage labor. However, this central framework of time has fallen from grace in the neoliberal workplace. Based on ethnography in the high-tech centers of Tel Aviv and Toronto, this article asks what temporal understandings are used to coordinate, in light of the rejection of modernist standardized time in favor of neoliberal ideologies of individual freedom and responsibility. Building on Evans-Pritchard’s foundational work on Nuer time, I argue that new temporalities of labor tend to be organized around shared tasks and offer that a new clock is being used in the contemporary workplace that sets task parameters, not hours or minutes, as the basic units of time. This new logic transforms time from a prime source of alienation into a mechanism to harness individual will in the workplace. Therefore, it has significant consequences for the ways in which work relationships are shaped in the tech industry and beyond.