Les ambivalences des 35 heures dans un organisme de sécurité sociale ou l’utopie du temps choisi

The main objective of this article is to see if shorter working time takes into account the wishes of salaried workers when setting up their schedules and if so, how and to what extent. To explore the dynamics of selected time as promoted by the 35-hour week, we examine two dimensions : the container of working time, i.e. its external, morphological or geometric aspects such as duration and schedule ; and its contents, i.e. the internal or structural aspects which concern the implementation of the workforce. The study was carried out in a local branch of the French public healthcare system and reveals that workers are ambivalent about selected time : though they gain some power in deciding how long they will work and how to manage their schedule, they have lost control over their actual working time, i.e. over the organization and content of their professional activity