From Social Force to Persistent Occupational Burnout: An Eight-Component Coordinate Framework for the Erosion of Temporal Agency

Existing models of occupational burnout — most notably Job Demands–Resources (JD- R) theory, including its current dynamic and multilevel extensions (Bakker et al., 2023) — describe organizational and individual predictors of exhaustion in detail. The socio- logical tradition of temporal agency shows that formal control over one’s work sched- ule is not equivalent to actual ownership of one’s time, yet it remains largely qualita- tive and is not linked to a multilevel architecture of work or to a psychophysiological mediator of exhaustion. This paper proposes an integrative conceptual model that unites eight elements of the human coordinate system — space, standards, forces, time, and its four derivatives (distances, speeds, energy, points of support) — into a hypothesized route: a social force, passing through an organizational/contextual macro-level and an individually experienced micro-level, forms a coordinate profile that is proposed to predict a reduction in temporal agency — a perceived capacity to make decisions about the onset, duration, and acceptable termination of an expo- sure (enacted behavior is treated as an external behavioral criterion for construct validation). Reduced temporal agency is hypothesized to be associated with a more pronounced, unresolved energetic aftereffect — a proposed mediator of the link with the persistence of burnout symptoms. Content-based hypotheses (H1–H4) and possi- ble, non-exclusive empirical testing strategies are proposed: latent profile analysis of coordinate profiles, longitudinal multilevel structural equation modeling, moderated regression, and exploratory network analysis. The proposed architecture has not yet received empirical validation; testing its mediational and trajectory components will require a longitudinal, not a cross-sectional, design.