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The hacker ethic 427THE FLEXIBLE RELATIONSHIP TO TIMEThe second element of Weber’s concept of the Protestant ethic is its relationshipto time. Weber describes the ideas of systematic work time and of optimizingtime. In the informational economy, time is still money. Time isoptimized to an even greater extent than in the industrial age. This is clear inthe global financial markets where the speed of change is unprecedented.Companies have to be more and more agile in reacting to developments intheir environment. And, for individuals, there is even a sense of continuousemergency in their work where everything has to happen faster and faster. Thepresent optimization of time continues the trend that started in the industrialeconomy.But there is also a new feature of the informational age that can be seen inits culture. Information technology makes it possible to transcend time andplace. It makes both global real-time operation and operation in “un-real” timepossible. The latter refers to the fact that IT systems facilitate a way of doingthings, in which contributions to a process do not have to be made in synchronoustime. This means a new, more flexible relationship to time, which breaksthe mold of everyone working in the same sequential time. This results in thepossibility of organizing one’s own time and of living one’s life in a new way.The informational economy’s structural equivalent to this flexible relationshipto time is project-based work. This is why few people any longer have theindustrial economy’s paradigmatic life-long career in the same job, a developmentthat has both its bright side and downside: while it means that manyworkers are able to enjoy new challenges, if there is no social protection tomatch the new flexible labor market, it also generates uncertainty for manyworkers.More positively for most involved, the fact that work is increasingly organizedaround projects means that people are given more power to self-managetime. As work is increasingly defined by results, workers get more freedom tocustomize the ways in which they can achieve these results. Workers can useIT to give them more freedom in relation to time and place and to combinetheir work and leisure lives more flexibly.This development is again linked to innovation: not everyone’s creativerhythm (not to mention other aspects of life) runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. everyday, so it makes sense for companies to allow individual patterns of creativity.In addition, the work produced is not primarily a function of the time taken (asit was in the industrial economy, for example, on the assembly line), but theproduct of work is primarily a function of innovation.All of this does not mean any idealistic relationship to time. It certainlydoes not mean anything like the hype of “telecommuting,” which has notbecome a significant part of real working life. (This is another example of