Dr. Weiss has been awarded a prestigious €1.5 million Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). The five-year grant will fund her research project TIMEQUITY.
TIMEQUITY explores how time, as an often-overlooked mechanism, shapes opportunities and inequalities in the world of work.
Time is central to how work is organised. It shapes when people work, for how long, at what pace, and in what sequence. For example, when are meetings scheduled, how quickly are vacancies advertised and filled, and what availability is expected? Who can meet these temporal demands, who benefits from them – and who is disadvantaged or excluded as a result?
TIMEQUITY examines how temporal structures, processes, and social norms in organisations shape who can participate, persist, and progress at work. The central question is how organisational demands and individual temporal needs and capacities come together to create, reinforce, or reduce inequalities.
Theoretically, the project brings together research on organisational inequality regimes and working-time regimes with three perspectives on time – as a resource, a structure, and a process – and Bourdieu’s theory of practice. This relational framework allows TIMEQUITY to examine how organisational rules and routines, individual agency, and power relations interact to produce temporal advantage and disadvantage.
TIMEQUITY combines in-depth organisational case studies, qualitative longitudinal interviews on career trajectories, and quantitative analyses of large-scale European microdata. It will advance our understanding of how time and inequality are intertwined at work and identify concrete ways for organisations to widen opportunities for participation and career development.
We congratulate Dr. Weiss on this outstanding achievement!