This is a fascinating and timely book that provides evidence based arguments as to why and how shorter paid work time would contribute to social justice while bringing substantive environmental and economic benefits for all. The collection of twelve essays in this book provide a unique opportunity for researchers to easily follow the discussions held at an expert seminar convened following the conference ‘About time: examining the case for a shorter working week’ at the London School of Economics in 2012. While the social and economic goals that could be achieved by reducing paid work hours is the central theme of the book, it also covers a collection of essays about different country experiences across Europe that introduced different arrangements to shorten work time over the last two centuries. The commentaries upon and the extended discussions following each essay make the book a captivating read.

Problematizing the molded assumptions on time and how we experience the ‘clock-time’, the volume also covers innovative proposals including a ‘four-day week’ or the ‘national gardening leave’ as alternative arrangements for a better life. The cross-country comparisons on different patterns of work day reductions provide the reader with diverse practices in implementing shorter work hour policy. Authors also draw attention to the potential criticisms and controversial issues associated with each of the exercises that deserve deeper explorations and the short essays on earlier experiences of reductions in work time provide key lessons for the readers (Hayden in this volume). This is what makes the book an instructive and a useful resource particularly for policy makers to enhance environmentally sustainable social and economic justice.

The essays provide a wide range of benefits of reduced work hours such as lower carbon emissions, sustainable ecological and gender equitable outcomes in terms of redistribution of time between paid and unpaid care work; and emphasizes the failure of the conventional approach on economic growth, that mostly focuses on efficiency, constant expansion of markets and technology upgrading, as the principal theme of this volume. The introductory chapter of the book by Anna Coote raises critical questions and potential issues of interest for the reader, by elaborating on the central theme and linking specific contexts in each essay to this through the summaries that highlight the main features of each essay.

Next, the failure of standard approaches to achieve the targeted carbon emissions and reductions in footprint is examined in the illuminating essay by Juliet Schor, where the estimates of the impacts of reductions in work hours (by 10% and 25%) on the ecological footprint, carbon footprint and carbon emissions are provided across high income OECD countries between the period 1970–2007. Based on their findings, they argue shorter work hours are imperative not only to stabilize the demand, which becomes even more important during times of crisis, it can also help reduce high rates of unemployment when price adjustments cannot clear the labour market. Presenting the trends in annual work hours since the 1950s juxtaposed with labour productivity growth across high income countries, Schor proposes to compensate the costs of shorter work hours through the gains in productivity growth, which appears as the most feasible path to follow both economically and politically. The two commentaries on this essay, by Robert Skidelsky and Tim Jackson, support and reveal that the dilemma of faster growth and the ‘growth equals jobs’ argument is unhelpful. They discuss the reasons why productivity gains have not been translated into more leisure time.

In the following two thought-provoking essays, Barbara Adams and Mark Davis challenge our well-established assumptions that are troubling our lives. Adams seeks to answer what is ‘time’ and what is ‘work time’ by elaborating on our perception of time and how we experience ‘clock-time’ and goes on to discuss how the abstraction of time through clock-time decontextualizes our experience of it, a discussion essential as a precondition to achieve sustainable work. In a similar manner, Mark Davis argues that despite major socio-cultural changes in our lives through information technologies, we live a lonelier life devoid of meaningful human contact. Davis’ essay raises our awareness about our consumer living styles hurried for the pursuit of greater financial resources and remarks the urgent need for a transition away from our isolated virtual lives into connected communities, which could be achieved by shorter work hours.

Valerie Bryson and Tania Burchardt examine the benefits of shorter paid work hours to transform the existing gender norms, that could lead to important steps towards greater gender equality by redistribution of caring and paid work responsibilities more equitably. Bryson's essay starts by identifying how care work, mostly undertaken by women, can be time consuming yet go unrecognized in terms of its contribution to well-being of the society. At the heart of differences between the care work time and paid work time lies the interpersonal relationships involved in care work that require a fluid and more process oriented sense of time. Asymmetric distribution of care work burdens in general leads to penalties for women in access to employment, to earnings and financial resources. Added onto the gender-blind employment policies, this division of labour adversely affects women's employment and participation in paid work. Bryson also notes that care work is a critically important public good that cannot be left to market mechanisms. This leads to her argument in favor of shorter working hours for its potential to transform the traditional gender based division of labour and reduction of gender inequalities in the paid labour market.

In her essay, Burchardt provides an innovative conceptual model that integrates the capability approach to standard of living, that is based on the necessity of an adequate number of unpaid care work hours to meet the needs of an individual as well as paid hours. Most of the constraints faced by people are shaped not only by their own characteristics but also by their commitment to others, interactions at the household/community level as well as by the wider social and economic context, which in turn determine their choices and their command over time and disposable income. In such a setting, while pointing out the potential gains of shorter paid work hours as an enhancement to the capability sets of individuals, vis-a-vis the specific needs of the low income households that require high care work burdens, Burchardt also draws attention to the potential deterioration of these households’ capacity to meet their market based needs due to shorter weeks of work. Such households would need to be targeted with complementary policies that compensate for the reduced income depending on their specific conditions to ensure an expanded capabilities set.

Overall, the discussions on shorter paid work hours reiterate the old question of the ‘normal’ length of the working day that goes back to the emergence of industrial capitalism: the time when factory work was frequently accompanied by commonly used women's and child labour under dreadful working conditions. It is not surprising that the issue of care crisis and the work-life balance is a commonly shared underlying reason once again behind the current debates on work time in many countries with diverse socio-cultural contexts. The unbalanced division of labour based on gender and its persistence despite all the changes and transformation in production relations reiterates the overarching features of gender inequalities in our societies. The working day is determined by the social context and the nature of the conflict primarily between capital and labour, fueled by other social and hierarchical stratifications. The eight-hour day movements over the two centuries across the globe fundamentally owe a debt to the strength of the women's movement as part of the labour movements in solidarity for a better life.

This book reminds us why it is necessary to keep talking about feminist economics. Sharing common goals with contributors of this book, feminist economists have demonstrated the importance of understanding social and institutional structures to achieve social and distributive justice, for more than four decades. Feminists’ arguments for re-defining economics at the outset as well as the reconceptualization of work, well-being, growth and labour productivity have been recognized by a wider community especially following the start of the Great Recession in the developed world. More scholars joined the ranks questioning the conventional wisdom that high economic growth and employment and increasing labour productivity are the preconditions for an achievement of a better life and provide evidence that contradicts these ideas. The perspective of feminist economics would support and immensely strengthen the arguments for shorter work hours provided in this book as it's an understanding of the economic sphere centered around human life, which calls for a transformation and re-organization of the society with full respect for Mother Earth and all forms of life which inhabit the Earth.