Abstract
In this essay, I want to shed light on the phenomena of night and nightwork as important topics which have been so far overlooked in organization studies. Inspired by insights of new materialism (Barad), I propose and investigate night as ‘time-space’, and present intertwined dimensions (temporal, spatial, social, material, etc.) of intra-actions between human beings and night. To better understand our intra-actions and entanglements with night, I provide a short historical overview which highlights past attempts to turn nightwork, once a forbidden and ungodly occupation, into a common and laudable one. I then discuss current efforts to manage and control certain dimensions of night (temporal/material and spatial/social) as well as aspects of night and nightwork that are not entirely manageable. The essay advocates going beyond traditional ontological dualisms by stressing our entanglements and intra-actions with night, thus advancing our understanding of nightwork, related bodily limitations and resistance at night. These topics call for further studies of organizations and work at night.
When movie makers fake a night scene by shooting it through heavy filters, they call the process ‘day for night’. We now take for granted that we can do the same by using electric light, that the working world moves seamlessly from daytime to nighttime […]. Yet the inventions that have made this possible are little more than a century old and there is still something not quite right – maybe not even quite sane – about a working life led at night. (Alvarez, 1995, p. xiii)
Introduction
In this essay, I present night as an important and relevant topic for organizational research. Despite the increasing normalization of nightwork in and outside of organizations (Crary, 2014), we do not know much about organizations and work at night. Key phenomena such as working, organizing and managing are typically discussed as standard daytime occurrences. However, organizations often work differently at night (e.g. tasks are slowed down, management and/or colleagues leave, etc.) and nightworkers might experience work differently based on these altered conditions and the effects of nightwork on their bodies and minds (e.g. tiredness, exhaustion, fatigue, etc.) (Müller, 2019). As organizational researchers, we thus need to advance our knowledge on work at night.
As a first step, before moving on to nightwork and organizations at night, we need to know more about night as such. Although people typically think of night in terms of periodically occurring darkness, night can be connected to many other dimensions, and thus defies being subsumed under ontological ‘dualisms’ such as the nature-culture dualism (Barad, 2007; Coole and Frost, 2010). We can understand night, for example, as a set of physical phenomena based on the absence of sunlight, as a range of physiological effects on human bodies, and as a variety of culturally and socially influenced concepts and practices associated with ‘otherness’ or deviance from daytime norms and behaviours. A typical night entertainment district, for instance, can function according to ‘night’, even at the break of dawn as daylight slowly returns. Thus, night poses a conceptual contrast and difference to day. In this essay, I set out to investigate night as specific ‘time-space’. I do so from a perspective of new materialism (Barad, 2001, 2003, 2007; Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012), which provides the basis for shedding light on questions related to nightwork, organizing, managing and resisting at night.
Nightwork, according to Eurostat, 1 is work done ‘during usual sleeping hours’. It includes what I call ‘regular’ nightshifts (daytime tasks continue at night), incident or emergency shifts (taking care of nightly incidents or emergencies), ‘partial nights’ (very early or late hours, or taking work home for the evening or night), and self-employed nightwork (by entrepreneurs, freelancers, etc.). Especially now, as nightwork is normalized in what Crary (2014) describes as ‘24/7 capitalism’ – the current expression of which finds form in the ‘gig economy’ (Fleming, 2017) and round-the-clock ordering and consuming – we need to study what is going on at night in and around organizations.
From studies in occupational medicine we know that nightwork involves numerous detrimental bodily, mental and social effects (Knutsson, 2003). Most notably, these include disturbed sleep-wake patterns (Schulz, Bes, & Jobert, 1998) and their impact on health, as well as disrupted social and family interactions (Schor, 2008). In 2007, the World Health Organization officially named nightwork a probable cause of cancer. 2 Studies have found links between nightwork and depression (Scott, Monk, & Brink, 1997) and nightwork and dementia (Ju, Lucey, & Holtzman, 2014). These and similar findings are the basis of working time laws, which typically regulate the frequency and duration of nightshifts as well as extra compensation. What medical research on nightwork cannot provide, however, are conceptualizations of night and studies of nightwork that go beyond the measurable effects on the body or mind.
This essay’s key contributions to organizational research are the following: first, I want to present night and nightwork as highly relevant topics for organizational research, which have not been attended to so far. Second, I emphasize a new materialism perspective for capturing our intricate ‘entanglements’ and ‘intra-actions’ (Barad, 2007) with night, thus moving beyond traditional ontological dualisms such as subject-object, nature-culture, or immaterial-material. This perspective allows me to combine temporal, material, spatial and social dimensions of night in novel ways, and it also points to ethical considerations of politics and policies around nightwork. And third, I highlight past and present attempts to manage night through both mediating its influences on nightworkers’ circadian rhythms (e.g. experimenting with artificial lighting, different shift-models, or sleep medication) and attempting to control the meanings and connotations of ‘otherness’ and deviance compared to standard daytime behaviours (see e.g. Hobbs, Hadfield, Lister, & Winlow, 2003; Monaghan, 2002; Palmer, 2000; R. Williams, 2008). These attempts and related insights point to substantial differences between night and day, for example in the form of ‘nocturnal mindsets’ – a mode of reasoning whereby differences between night and day justify looser interpretations of daytime rules (Müller, 2019).
The structure of this paper is the following: I start with an ontological inquiry of night to better understand this phenomenon and our ‘intra-actions’ (Barad, 2007) with it. I then introduce night as time-space and provide a brief historical overview of how this time-space has been culturally shaped. These insights then serve as a basis for investigating topics that are important for organizations today, such as nightwork, biopolitical interests around rest and sleep, and questions around organizing, managing and resisting at night.
Into the Night…
Multiple dimensions of night
The term ‘night’ is not trivial but connected to multiplicity, tensions and inconsistencies. When we refer to ‘night’ – as a rhetorical shortcut – we might, for example, think about: a set of physical phenomena, such as the lack of sunlight and consequent lower temperatures, which occur in regular intervals but with varying duration; a set of physiological influences on our bodies’ circadian rhythms and corresponding bodily processes; a set of culturally influenced ideas, concepts and related practices – for instance, the Inuit view night and day as a mental construction that occurs even during the longer ‘arctic night’ (Bordin, 2004); a set of discourses around all of these aspects; and a metaphor 3 to be used in various contexts (to point to more primal forces, pre-scientific thinking, invisibility, etc.). What then is night, actually, in terms of ontology? And why does this matter for organizational research?
To approach ‘night’, I turn to a new materialism perspective, which is currently prospering in the humanities, in feminist theories, in the social sciences and many other fields. This perspective challenges our understanding of ontology (theory of being) as being distinct from epistemology (theory of knowing), a point to which I return later in this section. Classic writings on ontology go back to ancient Greek philosophers, with Aristotle’s ‘Categories’ (2001) as a seminal piece. While many modern philosophers developed or challenged these ancient ideas (see e.g. Westerhoff, 2005), dominant ways of thinking about ontology typically revolve around a ‘Newtonian-Cartesian understanding’ of ‘dead matter and human subjects apart from it’ (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 8). New materialism approaches, Coole and Frost (2010) argue, provide alternative ways of thinking, which form a ‘critique of ontological dualism such as one finds in Cartesianism’ (p. 8).
One influential line of thought in this regard belongs to physicist Karen Barad’s (2001, 2003, 2007) work on quantum physics and its implications for the social sciences (Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012). Inspired by the thinking of Nils Bohr, Barad (2007) uses the famous ‘light-as-waves-and/or-particles’ discussion as one of her starting points to develop a theory of ‘agential realism’. In physics, Barad explains, particles and waves are distinct and mutually exclusive phenomena. When sent through a ‘two-slit apparatus’ (two slits in front of a detector screen), particles typically lead to a specific pattern (more impacts directly behind the slits), whereas waves show a different pattern that indicates interference and diffraction (i.e. the bending of waves around the outlines of an obstacle). However, sending electrons (tiny particles) through this apparatus results in a surprising interference pattern which only waves produce.
Discussions between Einstein and Bohr about this surprising finding led them to discuss the addition of ‘which-path’ information to the two-slit apparatus (this means detecting which slit each single electron is taking). Although they could not conduct this experiment, Bohr predicted that there would be no interference pattern (waves), but only a particle pattern – so, if we identify electrons as particles and not waves (which would be the case when using a ‘which-path’ detector), they would behave like particles (and not waves). In this way, ‘the nature of the observed phenomenon changes with corresponding changes in the apparatus’ (Barad, 2007, p. 106). This claim contradicts classic ideas of ontology (each entity has a certain way of being) and epistemology (experiments reveal the pre-existing determinate nature of the entity being measured): we can only understand the ‘being’ of something through our entanglement with it. Barad therefore speaks of onto-epistemology, as these concepts are not separate, but intertwined. The primary ontological unit, according to Barad (2007), ‘is not independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties but rather phenomena’ (p. 139) that are inseparable entanglements – or ‘intra-actions’ (rather than interactions, which would presume the prior existence of independent entities) – of observer and observed, subject and object. Barad (2001) writes that ‘apparatuses are not mere observing instruments, but rather are specific [discursive-material] interventions/practices involving humans and nonhumans’ (p. 87).
To investigate night, these ideas are very useful. We can, for example, imagine being in a spaceship and looking at the sun and earth (we would be distant subjects merely observing the object of interest), or looking at day-and-night world maps 4 online. What we could observe is that night and day are constituting each other: as sunlight falls on a certain part of the earth (day), the other part lacks sunlight (night). Through the earth’s movements and rotation, this static field of sunlight appears to be moving over the surface of the earth. Night and day, we would think, are natural, physical and cyclical phenomena, determined by the presence or absence of sunlight.
Usually, however, we do not merely observe night, but we experience it and thus become part of our own understanding of night and day. We understand night through intra-acting with it, through being entangled with it. We are, in Barad’s (2007) terms, simultaneously part of the phenomenon (through our intra-actions with night) and the apparatus (through being engaged in material-discursive practices around night). Barad (2003) points to the posthuman, where humans are part of the open-ended apparatus to an undefinable extent. Indeed, the boundaries between human and nonhuman, nature and culture, knower and knowledge, and subject and object are only constituted through iterative intra-actions between phenomenon and apparatus – through the ‘agential cut’ (in contrast to the Cartesian cut, which takes this distinction for granted) (Barad, 2007). We experience night, for example, as interfering with our bodily rhythms (hormones, enzymes, organs, chemical systems, etc.) and our abilities (e.g. we see our surroundings less clearly compared to during the day; nocturnal animals, in contrast, might see well at night and can even distinguish between colours), or as influencing our subjectivity, emotions, cultural norms, language, etc. As our human existence is also composed of multiple dimensions, such as matter and subjectivity, the organic and inorganic (Coole & Frost, 2010; Harris & Robb, 2012), we intra-act with night in intricate ways. Thus, what we call night unfolds through our (individual and social) iterative intra-actions with it. In this way, the perspective moves away from naïve realist accounts of night and day. It cuts across more traditional dualisms, allowing us to think about them in new ways without summarizing or subsuming them.
Night as time-space
Inspired by the insights of new materialism (Barad, 2007; Coole & Frost, 2010), I conceptualize night as ‘time-space’: an entanglement of temporal dimensions, traditionally linked to the social and cultural sphere, and spatial dimensions, traditionally linked to the material domain. However, in this section, I turn these linkages around. To do this, I first introduce notions of time and space in organizational research, before coming back to night time-space.
The literature on time describes different socially and culturally shaped temporalities, such as objective and subjective time, clock- or event-time, or chonological and kairotic time; while objective time is regular and considered independent of human beings, subjective time is dynamic and irregular, experienced and constructed through events, conventions and norms in a dynamic way (Czarniawska, 2004; Orlikowski & Yates, 2002). The rise of the natural sciences established mechanical measurements to capture objective and ‘fungible’ time and emphasized the homogeneity of divisible units: one second, minute or hour is exactly the same as any other second, minute or hour (Bluedorn, 2002, p. 27ff). Measuring nighttime as fungible time 5 allowed employers to organize, manage and pay for nightwork in specific ways that disregard nightworkers’ subjective experiences of temporality.
When it comes to space, organizational researchers often view it as ‘fixed, dead and immobile’ (Taylor & Spicer, 2007, p. 325) – a neutral material container. In contrast to this view, Lefebvre (1991) proposed that space is socially produced, and that it influences who and what play a role in its production. Drawing on Lefebvre (1991), R. Williams (2008) describes how a physical quality of night (its darkness) changes space at night, as people do not feel observed. To trace waves of motion and activity as an overlay on space, many time-geographical approaches add time as a ‘vertical dimension’ to space on an x-y-axis (Crang, 2003, p. 192); in this manner, space (e.g. workplace, public space) is enacted in specific ways at different points in time. One of these points in time could then be night, which sweeps over a certain space or place, altering how it is enacted and changing the rules of enactment.
In this way, time and space are knit together: ‘[s]pace is not static, nor time spaceless […] neither can be conceptualized as the absence of the other’ (Massey, 1992, p. 80). We also see this close interlinkage in language. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), people often use spatial words to metaphorically conceptualize time in terms of space (e.g. ‘within a short space of time’, ‘short’ or ‘long’ periods of time); with regard to night, we use phrases such as ‘at night’, ‘in the night’ and ‘midnight’ (the middle of the night).
When observing night on a day-and-night world map, we think of the traditional linkages between temporal and social dimensions (nighttime linked to social conceptions of time) and between spatial and material dimensions (night seemingly moving over the earth’s surface as material space). However, Barad (2001, 2003, 2007) presents temporality, spatiality and materiality (instead of being an external parameter, a container and a fixed stubstance) as being constituted through iterative intra-actions: temporality through the iterative enfolding of discursive-material phenomena and practices, spatiality through ongoing processes of remaking of boundaries (through ‘agential cuts’ 6 ) and matter through substance-in-the-process-of-becoming that becomes part of further materializations. Inspired by these ideas, we can think of night in different ways: we experience night as temporal/material, as night intra-acts with our material bodies’ circadian rhythms (which might vary between people, but also within an individual based on seasons, geographical location, age, hormones, etc.). We could say that circadian rhythms have been produced through temporal-material sedimentations, and through our ancestors’ iterative entanglements with night and day. Moreover, we experience night as spatial/social in the form of conceptual space, which influences our subjectivity, understanding of social norms and rules, emotions and behaviour. So, in contrast to Lefebvre (1991), who describes ‘nighttime spaces’ (p. 320) as material spaces that change at night when daytime prohibitions (e.g. about prostitution) are lifted, I introduce night as such as a conceptual space. This space, which is produced through ongoing processes of boundary-making between culture and nature, knower and knowledge, is typically but not necessarily tied to material space or the physical qualities of night (e.g. the Inuit conception of night as mental construction, or the ‘night mode’ of the night entertainment industry that continues even after sunrise).
Intra-acting with night as time-space, as we have seen, emphasizes the interlinkages of various dimensions of night. Yet, the cultural and societal conceptions of night time-space and related structures of power and control in the industrialized world have also been shaped over the course of previous centuries, as I outline in the next section.
Historical Entanglements with Night
To better understand night time-space and our contemporary intra-actions with it, we need to consider how our ancestors’ entanglements with social, temporal, cultural and material dimensions of night took shape over previous centuries. At the centre of these considerations are attempts to control the multiple dimensions of night and fit them into a capitalist success story in Western industrialized countries. The following historical overview highlights the various interests related to night, most prominently the incorporation of night into capitalizable modes of production and consumption. Attempts to control people’s intra-actions with night took form in efforts to change meanings and connotations of night (from sacred and dangerous to mundane and ordinary), conceptions of night’s temporality (from event-time to fungible clock-time) and social enactment related to night (from sleeping to working and consuming).
Sacred and dangerous night
In medieval times (~900 to 1550), night was feared (Ekirch, 2006; Koslofksy, 2011); it was inhabited by supernatural creatures and people therefore rather remained indoors. Ekirch (2006) writes that with some exceptions (e.g. harvesting), nightwork was illegal due to religious objections (night was for moral introspection and prayer) and poor quality of light (candles or oil lamps), which compromised product quality and brought heightened risk of fire. Moreover, nightwork was considered arduous and unhealthy, while sleep – in Western Europe, traditionally divided into two periods of sleep and an hour of wakefulness in between (Ekirch, 2006) – was considered important for the body and mind. In 1715, for example, people connected the ‘irascibility of bakers and their proclivity for violence’ to nightwork and a lack of sleep (Ekirch, 2006, p. 175).
However, night and nightwork also offered advantages: ‘hours were less regimented and discipline more lax’” (Ekirch, 2006, p. 175), which often resulted in pilfering, sexual misconduct, or other behaviours that were not tolerated during the day. In the early modern period (~1550 to 1790), people started to view night as time for private recreation and leisure (Koslofksy, 2011). Ranciere (2012) describes how (in a later period around 1830) worker-intellectuals used the nightly hours to engage in personal interests, free from employers’ inspection. The freedom from both hard labour and social scrutiny had thus become an inherent part of night: ‘night, on top of everything else, was a state of mind’ (Ekirch, 2006, p. 178).
Illuminated night (metaphorically and literally)
Due to the waning influence of religious authorities and religious thought, the notion of night as something sacred and perilous slowly changed. Enlightenment, the very metaphor depicting light (of reason) coming into darkness (of superstition), elevated the scientific method – experiments and empirical observation – as primary source of authority and legitimacy. This triumph of rational thought over religious superstition went along with secularization, which emphasized worldly institutions rather than religious authorities (Kramnick, 1995).
We can also take enlightenment in its literal sense. Given a lack of light that is hardly imaginable today, technical innovations for replacing candles, such as whale oil and coal gas lamps, were much needed. Night’s dark cloak of invisibility had even resulted in separate jurisdiction and sanctions for night and day (Koslofksy, 2011). ‘Procedures and penalties, indeed basic rights and privileges, changed from day to night’ (Ekirch, 2006, p. 88); for example, ‘[w]hat by day constituted homicide, even if the victim were a housebreaker, by night became a justifiable act of self-defense’ (p. 87), as the defender could not see whether the intruder meant to kill or merely steal.
While nightwork in organizations was still not practicable due to lack of light, the rise of (rather poor) street lighting in Europe (1660 to 1700 in major cities) enabled the emergence of ‘modern nights’ and an ambiguous balance between leisure and labour (Koslofksy, 2011). As population numbers and criminal incidents rose, public lighting became a means of social control, along with lantern smashing as a popular resistance strategy (Schivelbusch, 1995). Technical innovations such as coal gas led to brighter light, which worked to improve public order (Ekirch, 2006) and allowed people to ‘enter’ night. However, it needed Thomas Edison’s modified light bulb 7 (1880) to make electric light usable on a larger scale. Simply multiplying more traditional sources of light, for example, lighting up a ‘cotton mill with hundreds or even thousands of candles’ (Schivelbusch, 1995, p. 9), would have been too expensive and dangerous. But with Edison’s electric light, night became more penetrable for individuals, communities, authorities and organizations – and factories and other production companies soon began extending working hours into the night.
Industrialized night
Alongside improvements in communication and transportation systems, the invention of electric lighting fuelled industrialization (Schivelbusch, 1995) and the commercialization of night. Manufacturers realized that the steeper the investments in machines and equipment, ‘the stronger the stimulus to operate them more in order to amortize their expense’ (Melbin, 1987, p. 15). Marx (2011) writes that the lengthening of the working day to include the night ‘quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour. To appropriate labour during all the 24 hours of the day is, therefore, the inherent tendency of capitalist production’ (p. 282). Nightwork was becoming a regular phenomenon: ‘Night, declared the commercial classes, was open for business’ (Ekirch, 2006, p. 327).
In newly emerging factories all over Europe, nightwork became part of ‘jobs’ that could be done by different people taking turns (Melbin, 1987). This novel way of organizing was connected to the rising emphasis on clock-time, in which every minute or hour is the same as any other minute or hour – in work schedules, night became the same as day. The new work schedules changed the daily life patterns of the working class and left their mark on how people experienced night. The workers’ and their entire families’ lives were regulated by shifts and structured around scheduled working and sleeping times (Melbin, 1987). Sleep had long been viewed as a mere interruption of being rational and industrious (Crary, 2014). Now, night had turned from hours of private recreation into regular shifts for the entire family. Marx (2011) writes that the ‘prolongation of the working day’ which permits the industrial perpetuum mobile would go on ‘producing forever, did it not meet with certain natural obstructions in the weak bodies’ (p. 440).
Today, in what Crary (2014) calls ‘24/7 capitalism’, nightwork as a continuation of daytime activities is on the rise. Globalization, modern communication technologies and IT-based ordering systems for services and goods are fuelling nightly consumption and nightwork. Larger cities in particular provide a whole array of night industries and shops, nightclubs, cafes, dry-cleaning stores and pharmacies, which function as day-like zones for working and consuming (Heath, 1997; Hobbs et al., 2003). Nightwork, once predominant in the fields of medical care, societal order and production work, is becoming increasingly normalized.
(Un)Manageable Night
Past and present attempts to manage and control our intra-actions with night and increasing efforts to normalize nightwork, especially in the service sector, raise critical questions about how they affect our individual and collective entanglements with night. Each of us intra-acts with night in slightly different ways. Yet this experience is also collective, based on our human bodies and social conceptions of night time-space. One set of attempts to manage our intra-actions with night is focused on temporal/material dimensions, and manifests itself in (bio-)political questions around work, bodies, rest and sleep. Another set of attempts to manage our intra-actions with night centres on the spatial/social dimensions, and can be found in efforts to change historical and cultural conceptualizations of night as ‘other’ or ‘deviant’ (in the sense of non-standard or divergent). In the following, I elaborate on these attempts.
Temporal/material dimensions: Trying to manage work, bodies, sleep
The temporal/material dimensions of night emphasized by new materialism refer to our intra-actions with night through our corporeal bodies’ physiological reactions to it. Attempts to manage these dimensions revolve around modifying and controlling these physiological effects. 8 Medical research presents mounting evidence that human bodies react to night and day through circadian rhythms and that being up at night for longer periods has physiological consequences. Another influence on how we experience night is based on what we do at night: experiences of partying at night might be different from experiences of working, which is the focus of this section. While some might like nightwork, medical research and online self-help sites point to negative bodily and social effects of working at night, such as exhaustion, insomnia, fatigue, disorientation, or feeling out-of-sync with society. These findings not only point to short and long-term health risks, but also provide the context for (bio-)political questions around how to manage work, bodies, and sleep, and how to best incorporate night into modes of production and consumption.
In early management discourses (Barley & Kunda, 1992), workers’ bodies had been controlled and disciplined to elicit commitment and loyalty (e.g. in the industrial betterment discourse ~1870 to 1900) or to make work more effective (e.g. scientific management ~1910 to 1923). However, as Foucault (2008) writes, in the 20th century human bodies became part of a new apparatus of power which appears with neo-liberalism, namely biopolitics. In addition to the disciplinary apparatus aimed at governing the individual, biopolitical approaches are about governing and managing statistical parts of the population (Munro, 2012). Foucault (2008) mentions ‘human capital’ to emphasize that from a neo-liberal perspective, workers are not detached from their potential labour power, but that labour power is the actual person – body, mind, physical abilities, genetics, education, etc. Instead of being a partner of exchange (wage for labour), the homo oeconomicus in neo-liberalism is ‘an entrepreneur of himself’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 226). This emerging neo-liberal approach fuelled the emergence of biopolitics and biopolitical techniques (Munro, 2012).
In organizations, these biopolitical techniques include (medical) research on how nightwork can be made more tolerable for nightworkers. Researchers, for example, experiment with various diets for nightworkers, controlled on-duty napping, and artificial lighting to find out which types of light are the best for the functioning of the human body and mind (e.g. Burgess, Sharkey, & Eastman, 2002; Lowden, Åkerstedt, & Wibom, 2004). These modern Hawthorne-like light experiments, which try to find cause-and-effect relations between nutrition, napping, lighting, and higher alertness and performance, can make nightwork more bearable, but also better justifiable. Through discouraging sleep and sleepiness at night, these modern experiments might even aggravate sleeping problems during the day.
Another field of medical research investigates different shift models. Nightwork is typically structured through classic rotating shift models, often a three-shift model based on morning, afternoon and night shifts 9 with patterns of forward rotation (day to afternoon to night) or backward rotation (day to night to afternoon). The goal of medical research here is to find patterns that have less detrimental effects on the body than others over time (e.g. Sonati et al., 2016). These real-life experiments result in indicators for how to best organize nightwork; for example, adjusting shift schedules to increase the number of years people can bear nightwork (which over time causes medical problems regardless of shift models).
Biopolitical techniques for managing nights also include research on sleep (Hancock, 2008; S. J. Williams, 2011) in medical and military studies. 10 The normalcy of nightwork today has resulted in a rise of sleeping medication revenues and usage in the US 11 and Europe. 12 S.J. Williams (2011) writes that the ‘pharmaceuticalisation of sleep and wakefulness’, either as therapy or as an attempt to make people more ‘effective’, is part of ‘the biopolitics of bodies today’ (p. 141). According to Wolf-Meyer (2012), the expansion of caffeinated beverages and legal stimulants as well as prescribed and over-the-counter sleep-promoting drugs indicate simultaneous desires for alertness and consolidated sleep (p. 18). But as our entanglements with night and day are cyclical and ongoing, sleeping pills or coffee not only affect the immediate experience, but also that of the following nights or days. Increasing interest in and findings from medical research on circadian rhythms 13 and sleep (for a more popular review, see Walker, 2017) reveal that the demands of nightly sleep appear inescapable for most people. This insight also reveals that the body and its need for sleep can be a site of resistance for nightworkers, as they might (accidentally or not) fall asleep during their shift. On #yotambienmedormi (I fell asleep too), for example, doctors posted pictures of themselves and co-workers who had fallen asleep during nightwork. This was done to defend a colleague who fell asleep on a night shift only to have a patient post pictures of her sleeping. 14 This resistance against shaming a colleague centred on the argument that doctors are human beings, not machines.
Medical research on how to best help nightworkers cope with demands of sleep, wakefulness and alertness goes along with media anecdotes of people hardly needing any sleep. Portrayals of politicians, 15 investment bankers, 16 and successful lawyers 17 pulling regular all-nighters can even become part of the popular discourse around certain professions, suggesting that sleeping more than the bare minimum is a sign of weakness. Moreover, as Crary (2014) writes, normalizing nightwork also means turning ‘unproductive’ sleep into a state of ‘low power readiness’ (p. 13), from which people can switch into full power consciousness and productivity. Research on learning even produced the idea of ‘sleep-learning’, 18 i.e. brain stimulation with new information (e.g. a foreign language, as depicted in Huxley’s novel Brave New World), to turn sleep into something useful. Similarly, drawing on Lucas (2010), Fleming (2014) mentions sleep-working as part of a neo-liberal agenda where ‘life itself’ goes to work. According to Hancock (2008), sleep ‘can be understood as a form of embodied capital’ that can be realized in the form of increased energy, alertness and creativity (p. 420). Thus, sleep has become entangled with biopolitical technologies for making it useful and manageable.
The interests of various stakeholders (organizations, nightworkers, policy makers, etc.) in night are highly political. Central questions in the ‘politics of sleep’ (S. J. Williams, 2011) revolve around how societies conceptualize and organize night, who is sleeping and who is working at night (and under what conditions) and the worth of nightwork or undisturbed sleep. Socio-economic studies 19 on sleeping patterns, for example, show that well-educated and wealthy people appear to have more hours of uninterrupted and regular sleep than others. In organizations, it is often HR or health managers who (have to) become managers of biopolitics. They need to combine care for nightworkers (providing information about coping with nightwork, setting up vending machines for food, etc.) with the necessity to make the best use of their labour in various shift models. These approaches aim to help nightworkers cope, but they also help employers subject nightworkers to the conditions of nightwork more efficiently.
Spatial/social dimensions: Trying to control connotations of otherness, deviance, resistance
The spatial/social dimensions of our intra-actions with night highlight night as a conceptual space shaped by socio-cultural and historical influences. Attempts to control these influences focus on managing social and cultural meanings of night – more specifically connotations of deviance and resistance around night – so that night ultimately becomes like any other part of the 24-hour cycle. However, despite the ongoing normalization of nightwork (Crary, 2014), some aspects and connotations of night appear to be unmanageable: limited visibility, perceptions of ‘otherness’ and deviance, and associated transgressive or downright illegal behaviours (Palmer, 2000; R. Williams, 2008).
The connotations of night as time-space for the deviant, different, or ‘upside down’ (similar to a kind of alternative space in the popular TV series Stranger Things 20 ) is often paired with practices and occupations revolving around loose interpretations of (daytime) rules. The night entertainment industry, for instance, creates spaces for people looking for love, sex, drinking, smoking and gambling, which can lead to violent (Monaghan, 2002) and other problematic behaviour (including vomiting, urinating and shouting in public spaces). However, it is not just practices and occupations – e.g. bouncers (Hobbs et al., 2003) – that might be different at night, but also the people who turn to nightwork out of necessity (Palmer, 2000) (e.g. as sex-workers, pole-dancers, dock workers and criminals in semi-regulated zones of nightwork that are only partly ‘visible’ to state authorities). Thus, night also plays out in unequal opportunities, so that certain people end up in the night time-space. Night as time-space of otherness and deviance is also something Melbin (1978) describes in his analogy of night as a ‘frontier’: the frontier inhabitants live in extreme conditions, have to bear physical hardships and less security, experience more violence but also more helpfulness, are under less scrutiny when it comes to the interpretation of rules, and thus experience more freedom and autonomy.
In organizations, night time-space often goes along with limited organizational control (compared to day shifts) and with more autonomy for nightworkers, as formal rules are suspended or interpreted more casually. In the organizational literature, when describing gold-bricking (deliberately working less than one is able to), Roy (1952) briefly mentions how factory workers at night would work very hard for some hours to reach their target performance and then sit around. This would not be tolerated during days. Similarly, Hood (1988) describes janitors having more autonomy and control over their work at night compared to days. While organizational control is still in place at night, more informal and casual ways of interpreting daytime rules might lead to deviant behaviour.
An empirical study (Müller, 2019) illustrates that ‘nocturnal mindsets’, a form of reasoning that justifies looser interpretations of daytime rules, can lead to behavioural changes at night. The study highlights our entanglement with the spatial/social and temporal/material dimensions of night by showing how nocturnal mindsets can result from organizational changes, such as the absence of management or colleagues, and the bodily experiences of exhaustion and fatigue. Feelings of freedom from managerial or peer scrutiny (due to a shift from direct to indirect supervision) together with physiological reactions of circadian rhythm disturbances can lead to behaviours of resisting and escaping that would not otherwise occur during days. These behaviours can then become part of regularly exhibited social or group norms during nightshifts (Müller, 2019). Additionally, these more relaxed interpretations and potentially improvised fashions of following rules at night might heighten the motivation for nightworkers to change their behaviour or resist in the first place. Nightworkers might also find untapped resources of resistance, i.e. various forms of oppositional workplace practices (Thomas & Davies, 2005), which the organizational literature has yet to describe.
An illustration of nightly behaviour that deviates from and resists daytime norms was presented in a video of a news agency employee, who quit her job at night with a self-made video. 21 This video shows her dancing in a deserted open-plan office to the song ‘Gone’ from rapper Kanye West. In the video, short messages explain what is going on, starting with ‘It’s 4.30 am and I am at work.’ She then tells the viewers she is working for a company producing news videos and continues with ‘So I figured … I’d make ONE video of my own. To focus on the content instead of worry about the views. Oh, and to let my boss know… (dance break) I quit. I QUIT!’ After she has switched off the lights and left, the text reads ‘I’m gone. The video made the news at the time and the employee, Marina, said later that she was working at night for several weeks which ‘makes you lose the connection with reality […] and I think that’s what kind of happened.’ 22 This state of not feeling in the same time-space as ‘reality’ (or standard daytime structures) had the potential to influence her decision to quit her job. Moreover, the specific time-space of night might have motivated her to execute her decision in a unique way: using the spatial possibilities that the absence of management and colleagues provided to dance in various places of the big office to loud music, and using messages in the video that might have been formulated differently during days.
We saw earlier that at night, as a ‘state of mind’ (Ekirch, 2006, p. 178) or conceptual space, the interests of employers became secondary while people could pursue other more personal interests (Ranciere, 2012). In 24/7 capitalism (Crary, 2014), however, these spaces for private interests are contested, as the neo-liberal rationale and capitalist mode take over. What was once private and tied to personal interests is now invited back – at least parts of it and in a very specific and pre-designed way – into the workplace (Fleming, 2014; Fleming & Sturdy, 2009). In some cases, night entertainment themes in the form of bars and nightclub furniture are even built into office architecture (Alexandersson & Kalonaityte, 2018) as an attempt to conjure up a nightlife atmosphere in a controlled manner - and without the ‘darker’ connotations the notion of night might otherwise entail. Ultimately, however, the more the night ‘frontier’ (Melbin, 1987) is colonized, the less alternative spaces we have left to project and outsource the private and deviant in our societies.
Implications for Organizational Research
As night has been overlooked in organization and management studies so far, we urgently need to investigate and theorize night and nightwork in order to complement medical studies. Inspired by a new materialism perspective (Barad, 2001, 2003, 2007), which emphasizes our entanglements and intra-actions with night in novel ways, I introduced night as space-time as an alternative to physical spaces at night (Lefebvre, 1991; R. Williams, 2008). Based on these insights, I then moved on to discuss important topics such as nightwork, circadian rhythms and bodily limitations, and organizing and resisting at night.
The implications of this essay revolve around two key takeaways: first, our intra-actions with night emphasize – and call for – a new materialism perspective, which emphasizes circadian rhythms and cultural conceptualizations of night; second, we need to investigate the differences between night and day in organizations to advance our knowledge about issues of power, control and resistance. I elaborate on these two points in more detail.
The first set of implications revolves around the theorization of night from a new materialism perspective (Barad, 2001, 2007; Coole & Frost, 2010), which views phenomena that emerge out of intra-actions and entanglements as the primary ontological unit. These entanglements, as mentioned, are not just interactions between previously fixed ontological entities. Rather, the subject and object of inquiry first emerge through these entanglements (Barad, 2001, 2007). When it comes to night, inquiries based on this perspective cut across traditional ideas about (night)time as social and space as material concept. The topic of night puts the focus on the human body and its physiological rhythms (temporal/material dimensions) and on night as a conceptual space tied to social and cultural connotations of otherness, deviance and resistance (spatial/social dimensions). Thus, instead of only looking at organizations with the lens of social constructivism (as one of the main approaches in critical organizational research), we also need to address the temporal/material dimensions that intra-act with our bodies and minds. Emphasizing our bodies, nevertheless, also means including ethics – Barad (2007) speaks of ethico-onto-epistemology, as the entanglement between subject and object is always already linked to ethical thinking. Instead of mere distant observations, our intimate intra-actions with night are an ideal framework to inform politics and policies around nightwork. Future research on night(work) could therefore study bodies at work more generally and investigate relations between bodies, sleep, work, political interests and ethical considerations.
The second set of implications revolves around differences between night and day in the context of work and organizations. The essay has shown that night is ultimately a time-space of altered relationships between time, space, bodies, rhythms and meanings. An understanding of night as the time-space of the deviant and transgressive (Ekirch, 2006; Koslofksy, 2011; Palmer, 2000; Schivelbusch, 1995; R. Williams, 2008) points to differences in how organizations manage, control and survey nightwork; in addition, it highlights differences in how nightworkers interpret daytime rules, engage in deviant behaviour and resist. The essay illustrated, for example, that attempts to manage the circadian rhythms of nightworkers might not work very well: trying to tell nightworkers that night is just like day might jar their bodily experiences, which tell them that night actually is different; exhaustion, fatigue and disorientation remind people that at night things are ‘upside down’, including interpretations of rules and judgements about what is acceptable and what is not (Müller, 2019). One potentially fruitful avenue for future research could thus be the topic of resistance: bodily and mental exhaustion might lead to acts of resistance such as falling asleep or might remind people of the connotations of night which allow them to interpret rules differently. Although organizational researchers have covered concepts such as working, organizing, managing and resisting extensively as daytime phenomena, they might miss crucial differences brought about by night. Investigating these tensions and the interplay between them can thus advance our knowledge of organizations and organizing.
Night time-space has become intricately linked to work (Crary, 2014) but it is a zone of extreme working conditions (Bloomfield & Dale, 2015). ‘Flexibilization’ of working times often means normalization of nightwork. Limited options on the labour market influence the choices of people to enter this time-space, despite health risks and negative experiences. Marx’ (2011) description of the ‘perpetuum mobile’ of production which requires a relay system covering 24-hour periods is not the only way work can be structured; however, this capitalist mode of production is hard to escape. Night nevertheless offers spaces of resistance – for example, through bodies and minds that resist, through deviant interpretations of rules and behaviour, through alternative ‘night cultures’ – all of which play out along multiple dimensions of night.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors, the anonymous reviewers, as well as Christian Huber, André Spicer, and Viktorija Kalonaityte for helpful comments on earlier versions of the article.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.