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Normalizing the Workplace Nap: Blurring the Boundaries between Public and Private Space and Time

Steve Kroll-Smith

Napping at work was typically a fugitive behaviour, a small act of resistance against the goals of management and the workplace clock. Increasingly, however, employers are encouraging employees to sleep at the worksite. Indeed, some actively encourage this once deviant behaviour, promoting its restorative features and its relationship to increased productivity. This article examines the emergence of the management organized workplace nap in the US. Attention is paid to how the cultural meaning of sleeping at work is changing to normalize a soporific state that was, at one time, grounds for dismissal. Colonizing the nap at work is part of a larger trend that is reconfiguring the once bounded relationships between home and work and public and private space and time. Importantly, normalizing the workplace nap is not uniform. We identify at least two variants: breaktime napping and worktime napping. Each variant represents a different degree of management oversight and reflects the varying autonomy of the employee. In a final discussion, this initiative to create a more flexible work environment by inviting once private and fugitive acts into the open spaces of the worksite is contrasted with the marked decline of the siesta in China and Spain.

Key Words: China • management • napping • productivity • public and private space and time • Spain • United States • workplace

Current Sociology, Vol. 53, No. 1, 33-55 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0011392105048287


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