PATRONES DE DETECCIÓN DE CONSUMO DE DROGAS

A; Probably, yes - especially since the Griffith Report. (Amanda, session 2 f

Amanda has undoubtedly profited from changes in the National Health Service that have reduced state care for the mentally ill and increased the demand for support from the charity sector. These changes have enhanced her own employment security and her chances of moving employers should she want to. The increasing rate of change within the workplace, and in particular the emergence of 'multi-skilling', is also understood as providing her with skills that can only improve her long term employment prospects, whilst the work itself is flexible enough to allow her to design her own work programme. In many ways, then, her experiences would seem to place her in stark opposition to the experiences of those in less privileged positions within the workforce.

But, these changes have also radically increased her work load. Within the current economic climate accurate job descriptions are a thing of the past. The demands of multi­ tasking, in particular, are a cause of some stress. They necessitate rapid changes in her professional identity, changes that are instantaneous when dealing with clients on the advice line. In some ways we could almost suggest that Amanda's work experience makes her an "excellent candidate ... for the kind of schizophrenic identity that Jameson depicts" (Harvey, 1989^:287). More generally there is certainly suggested a sense of exhaustion as she struggles to deal with the sheer pace of recent change within the workplace and the increasing demands of her job.

In other words, w e need to be careful before automatically placing the new cultural class respondents in a position of employment privilege. Though recent changes may have increased their job security, those same changes have also dramatically increased the pressures of work. This adds a new complexity to our understandings of the divisions between a core and peripheral labour force and the different experiences of time that this division suggests. These complexities can be further illustrated by turning to the experiences of Alex.

^ The Griffith Report initiated the first of a series of reforms in the National Health Service in the early 1980s. The White Paper that emerged out of the report was a major influence in the subsequent 'rationalization' of the service.

Like George, Alex enjoys the privileges of management and, like Amanda, works in a rapidly expanding service industry. But, whilst the core workers in this sector might enjoy more control over their labour power and, in particular, more autonomy within the 'factory', they are not exempt from the insecurities of economic restructuring. N ot least, many of those sectors within which the new cultural class work - business services, or media and design, for example - are having to adjust to the rigours of global competition (King, 1990) and have always been characterised by a rather 'flexible' production process. Within graphic design, or animation, for example, production is geared around the 'concertina time' of the artistic process and, as these industries can only react to an increasingly volatile market, workers who are rushing to keep pace with demand one minute may find themselves unemployed the next. These pressures are increased where, like Alex, workers are self employed or, like Dorian, freelance, and secures for these workers in general a more ambiguous experience of the new work practices.

A number of these ambiguities are displayed by Alex. In the first place, whilst Paul and Pat both sought to resist the demands of 'factory time', as the owner Alex's task is to take control of the factory floor and to reduce the costs of overtime. Certainly he has a high degree of autonomy within the office and shares that sense of employment security displayed by both George and Amanda. But, even as he claims some control over an increasingly unstable work experience, it is interesting that Alex also moves to control the experiences of work time in ways very similar to the working class respondents:

"When I started there might be a month when there wouldn't be any work, in which case I'd just help on another job for a few weeks, or just take the time off and enjoy it - go on holiday .. 1 think I've sort of got used to it now, in fact you cease to feel insecure after a while .. I mean obviously w e can go through periods when we can't get any work, and then suddenly they're all on the phone again .. But I mean hopefully we'll carry on, and I presume they'll be little glitches again -

you just go with it, that's the market.

.. [In terms of the working day itselfj it's a very flexible day, if I want it to be. We are subject to the famous media deadline, but I would say .. [nowl both of us [he and his business partner] have settled down, both of us have got children, we make a lot more effort to sort the job out well in advance .. Also because of the economy of it - it's all union regulated so you can't afford overtime and all that .. Really the trick is to sit down and think it out in advance, to really structure it up well. If you get stuck you just pass the job onto someone else, and come back to it later."

(Alex, session 2, emphasis added)

Though clearly more secure in his employment prospects than either Paul or Pat, Alex still moves to contain the insecurities of a volatile market within the more comforting notions of cyclic time. Within the workplace too, though the work itself may be rather pressured, these pressures are made more manageable by the act of caricature. More significantly, Alex attempts to control the flexibility of the new work regimes in

ways very similar to Paul. In Alex's descriptions the post-Fordist animation process comes to sound more like a traditional Fordist assembly line. Each job is 'structured' well in advance and different components of the same campaign are regularly drawn by different animators (one taking the head, another the background, and so on).

This would suggest that, though in a position of some empowerment, Alex too is experiencing considerable insecurity in his working life and, not least, some generalised sense of temporal speed-up. Crucially, then, both Amanda and Alex seek to control these feelings in very similar ways. Most importantly, both attempt to separate the world of work, and the temporal insecurities it articulates, from a more 'natural', more 'authentic' sense of time to be found within the home. In this separation technology takes on an especially interesting role.

In the office, Alex is surrounded by the most advanced technologies (see chapter 4). He has to deal with a powerful example of what Adams (1992) called the 'multiplicity of contemporary times' (see chapter 2.2d). The animation process itself, for example, commonly necessitates the simultaneous management of a whole host of contradictory temporal rates - from 'real time' (what one sees on the screen) to the minute fractions of time (l/2 4 th of a second) through which each frame conveys a sense of movement. So too, as his business has become increasingly international, as well as keeping pace with overseas competitors, Alex must regularly negotiate business contracts across different time zones. If at work time is increasingly multiple, 'fast', and fundamentally insecure (what 'time' is it?) it is all the more important that at home Alex can access a very different, and more secure, sense of time.

Most obviously this is done by accessing a more 'authentic' sense of time rooted in those images of craft and the countryside now often found within the homes of the new cultural class (Wright, 1985). This demands that the space of the home itself is kept free from the intrusions of modern technology:

J: There almost seems to be a separation between things at work being done very