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job stress

220;work” and “workplace”. No longer the three Aristotelian dramatic unities. Work could be carried out in different places, not simultaneously, by workers who worked part time whenever it suited them best, Flextime and work from home are quickly replacing commuting as the preferred venue of the “workplace”. This fits exactly into the social fragmentation, which characterizes today’s world. The disintegration of previously cohesive social structures, such as the nuclear (not to mention the extended) family. This was all neatly wrapped in the ideology of individualism which was presented as a private case of capitalism and liberalism. People were encouraged to feel and behave as distinct, autonomous units. The perception of individuals as islands replaced the former perception of humans as cells in an organism. This trend was coupled with the unprecedented successive annual rises in productivity and increases in world trade. These trends were brought about by new management techniques, new production technology, innovative inventory control methods, automatization, robotization, plant modernization, telecommunications (which facilitates more efficient transfers of information), even new design concepts. But productivity gains made humans redundant. No amount of retraining could cope with the incredible rate of technological change. The more technologically advanced the country – the higher its structural unemployment (attributable to changes in the very structure of the market) went. In Western Europe, it shot up from 5-6% of the workforce to 9% in one decade. One way to manage this flood of ejected humans was to cut the workweek. Another was to support a large population of unemployed. The third, more tacit, way was to legitimize leisure time. Whereas the Jewish and Protestant work ethics condemned idleness in the past – they now started encouraging people to “self fulfill...

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