IT firms’ working time (de)regulation model

In this article, based on 140 interviews in two case studies led in Montreal in the previous decade, I draw on previous demonstration of the existence of unlimited unpaid overtime among videogame developers and software designers and use these two case studies to illustrate an emerging workplace regulation model based on unacknowledged unlimited and unpaid overtime. This model is stemming from combined information technology firms’ risk management strategy and project management as an organisation mode and closely tied to the high international mobility of both capital and workforce. Here I focus on (de)regulation of working time only, but it opens a path to theoretically account for (de)regulation of work more generally among an expanding workforce: the ‘new professionals’ in the knowledge work