A day in the life - The synchronisation of everyday life in the Netherlands: 1975 versus 1995

According to a wide variety of authors, we are witnessing a fundamental transformation and change in the structure of modern Western economy and society. Most authors situate the starting point of this transformation process somewhere in the middle of the seventies. The goal of this article is to portray from a temporal point of view the impact of this process for the Netherlands, that is, to analyze on an aggregate level the consequences of the spread of more flexible, decentralised forms of labour process and work organisation, and/or of the erosion of traditional habits and customs, for the temporal structure of everyday life. For that purpose, national time-budget data of 1995 are confronted with comparable data of 1975.