What is Project Time

The hi-tech firms that predominate in Silicon Valley contain a large proportion of knowledge workers—employees with high levels of education and expertise. The region is subsequently a useful prism by which to explore the shift in the pace of work and ideologies of labor control. Engineers in Silicon Valley are a prototypical example of “knowledge workers;” they are valued for their ability to contribute to firms’ competitive advantage via their expertise and innovation. This chapter reports on fifty four semi-structured interviews of high-skilled, white and Asian men and women engineers who worked in the hi-tech industry of Silicon Valley, focusing on the issue of work temporality. Temporality has long been understood as central to the labor process, and as inextricably linked to the mode of production. Here, I highlight the problematic aspects of the shift from the routinized schedule of “clock time”, characterized by rigid temporal boundaries between work and home, and “project time,” characterized by an erratic and increasing pace of work that appears to be largely unfettered by boundaries between private and work time.