Week Need

This paper sets out to examine and advocate change one of the most influential social structures in our society, so universal and fundamental hardly anyone even thinks about it anymore: the Calendar. More specifically, the number of days in a week. Currently, the number of days in a week is seven, a prime number difficult to divide. The concept of a seven day week is a hold over from the lunar calendar days, with about seven days between new and quarter and full moons. The modern form of the seven day week is split between five week-days and the two days of the weekends, and is easily the most important social structure in regards to scheduling the activities of life, from economics to socializing to education. The week has become a fixture of modern life, a bureaucratic monopoly unexamined by society that many historical sociologists would advocate the reform of.

Marx
The concept of time touches heavily on many themes in sociology. Marx would focus on how the owners of the means of production demand workers be at their job for a huge majority of the time, exploiting their labor during the weekday and distracting them with religion during the weekend. The idea of a five day work week where owners expect laborers to work a minimum of eight hours per day plus overtime is clearly surplus labor for which the owners are making a profit and the laborers didn’t actually need to do to earn their keep. The five day work week is an oppressive structure designed for maximum extraction of work so that laborers not only give more than they receive but also have no time to work for themselves. Or that the overworked and underpaid laborers are forced to take second jobs to make ends meet, and all the time out of the social structure of the week is squeezed out with barely enough time for sleep.
And then there are the weekends. Sunday, Saturday and Friday nights out of the seven day cycle are reserved for recreational activities and religion. Religion is the primary source for the idea of the week, so that every seven days people have a day of rest that they use to fulfill their religious duties. The owners of the means of production are more than willing to let workers have some time off for religion for several reasons. Having a repeated religious day every week is a constant distraction for the worker, focusing them on the rewards of the afterlife instead of the here and now. They are further distracted from forming class consciousness by the rampant consumerism of the economy, focusing on sports and video games and entertainment when they should really be organizing to overthrow the ownership society and the exploitive concept of the ‘week’.
Marx would challenge the very idea of having a structure like the weekday; instead he would advocate individuals working their own hours for their own benefits. He would want self-employed laborers to work as much or as little as they themselves needed, improving only their own lots in life. Weekends, with the distractions of religion and consumerism, would be also cast out, totally eliminating any need for the concept of a special seven day block of time between the patterns days and months. With the weekday/weekend dichotomy nullified and the 7 day period made arbitrary, true reform of the week structure can begin.

Weber
Weber would focus on the social reality of the weekday, how this arbitrary abstraction has become totally ingrained in modern civilization as a traditional source of power and ultimate bureaucratization, as well as promoting the Protestant work ethic by having most of the time devoted to work with religious days for rest. The concept of the week has a great deal of power. This power is legitimized by traditions going back centuries, but also by rational-legal means, expressed in countless legal documents and recognized by law. The week has become entrenched in bureaucracy, organized by formal rules and influencing nearly every aspect of the culture. This bureaucratic form of control is going to be nearly impossible to get rid of because of all these entanglements in all corners of life, despite being a completely man-made creation.
The concept of a week is the ultimate form of formal rationality because it is not based on any cycles in nature. The concept of years and days mirror the revolutions and rotations of the Earth, respectively, and are thus easily rationalized. The concept of a month is derived from the lunar cycles, although no longer accurately reflects them. But the week is an abstraction totally separate from these patterns, and its constant misalignment with these cycles in addition to the occasional presence of the leap-day leads to fourteen different calendar configurations and constant headaches. This is a clear indication of Weber’s iron cage, where a meaningless social structure has become totally engrained within a culture and is impossible to ignore or work around, and becomes nearly hardwired in human beings conceptions of time.
The protestant work ethic also has a great deal of influence on the idea of the week. Instead of working just enough to accomplish tasks and get by, work itself was idealized as a nearly pious duty, driving people to work far more than necessary. Success was a sign that people were predestined to be saved (especially if they went to church on Sundays) and the idea that people should be working a majority of the time supports the idea of having a short weekend, and probably encourages shortening it even more so people can get even more work done.
Weber would point out the difficulties in trying to reform the concept of the week, with the heavily entrenched bureaucracy reified in countless legal documents and every organization in the culture. But he would be in favor of reforming it because of the negative effects of having an unexamined and arbitrary structure having so dominating an influence on human life, and examination and reform are a way to escape the iron cage of bureaucratization.



Durkheim
Durkheim would focus on the idea of the week as a remnant of mechanical solidarity and also the societal sacredness of the weekend because of the complex abstract rituals based around it. The concept of the week is an old, sacred idea where each day is named after a deity. The idea of the week arose so that people could all perform rituals to their gods in a common pattern; in the modern context those rituals are performed on Sundays (for Christians) and Saturday (Sabbath). The sacredness of the weekend is also reinforced by the collective recreational activities western cultures perform on these days. Of course, having sacred weekends makes weekdays almost profane, and creates near indignation in the collective conscious when work intrudes on this special time.
The week as a pattern is obviously a throwback to the mechanical solidarity days, when people lived in low density environs and everyone needed to think and act along the same lines. And work as well; the fact that people generally wake up and go to work at about the same time five days a week is not a sign of organic solidarity. Advanced divisions of labor would definitely advocate an even numbered week, so that half the time one half of the laborers would be working, and the other half resting. Or more likely a 2 to 1 rotating schedule with six day weeks where people work 2/3rds of the time with constant overlap between shifts. Or any other arrangement of patterns besides the arbitrary 7 day week would be more organic and adaptable than the status quo.

Veblen
Veblen would focus on the leisure class mentality that has become built up around the weekdays (to earn $) and weekends (to show off $). The concept of people working more days than necessary for surplus income rather than necessity is indicative of the long work week. Self-esteem, class, and social status is driven as much by how much you can earn as how much you can spend. The weekends become a sign of status, because they are designated periods of non-working, scheduled leisure time that feeds into the idea of a conspicuously consuming leisure class. So not only is the week contributing to people working and earning more than they need, it is also contributing to people spending more than they earn. So this setup contributes in a very real manner to the idea of the consumer economy, with all the entanglements that implies.
The cultural lag of the concept of a day itself, with technology allowing round the clock work and worldwide communication, is in some serious need of reexamination. Markets are poised to buy, sell, and trade twenty four hours a day, because there is a world-wide demand for trade across every time zone. Technological advances like satellites and the internet have almost made local time obsolete, more so than even the concept of the week. To continue to uses this cultural belief when technology has made it obsolete is a prime example of cultural lag.
Cultural borrowing of the concept of the week goes back thousands of years in western civilization. With colonialism, the idea of the week has been borrowed and used by nearly every culture on earth, for the most part replacing previous short term patterns of days in favor of the Gregorian calendar. Most interestingly are the parallels between many, many cultures conceptions of the days of the week, hinting that this sort of borrowing has been going on for a long time.
Veblen would advise researching other cultures conception of the week, and borrowing one of those and adapting it to suit modern needs. He would probably advocate a shorter week, reducing time for both extraneous working and for leisurely weekends. This adaptation would face head-on the cultural lag behind modern economic and technological realities. The weekday/weekend split would also be closely reexamined because of its relation to overzealous consumerism, and steps taken to reduce harmful patterns.

Mannheim
Mannheim would acknowledge the week as a social constructed idea and that it is an ideology originating in the past and the capacity for intellectuals in a planned society to construct a more rational approach. He would be focused on the societal context of the week and how the Weltanschauung of the week is incredibly complicated, tied to most aspects of society. The ideology of the week is set in the distant past, with few justifications for keeping other than tradition and the difficulty in changing.
However, the reinterpretation of the week for modern and future needs can be classified under his terminology as utopian in nature. Week reform can be seen as part of his intellectually planed society, where concepts are meant to transcend present realities to bring about a better future.

Gramsci
Lastly, the universality of the concept of a seven day week is a striking example of hegemony in Gramsci’s terminology, not only because of the lack of challengers to this power structure, but every culture on earth as to deal with this dominant timeframe in one form or another.
This system of control, is propagated by the state primarily due to the education system, but also all the other government infrastructure, including the postal system. The dominance of the week in language is extremely important, as scheduling is often referred to by the name of the weekday so many weeks from now, instead of using exact numbers of days.
The ideology of the week goes unchallenged at every level of society, including the intellectual elites, who even while beginning to organize calendar reform ideology still cling to the idea of having a seven day week. The consciousness of the working class and the working class all follow this ideology of the week because they have been presented with no alternatives and the constant support by the media and civil society as a whole makes change virtually unthinkable.



Berger
Peter Berger contributions to sociology deal directly with the concept of the week. Most habits, when not daily, are performed on a weekly basis and dominate the behavior patterns of billions of people. These habits have come to give significant meaning to many days of the week, with Mondays being unpopular, Fridays as the gateway to the weekend, and so on. The structure of the week has come to dominate the consciousness of everyone with repeatable habits. Society has settled into an embedded routine of working on weekdays, and seeking entertainment on weekends. The weekend has become institutionalized into our culture, written into law and come to be expected as a natural course of events, absolutely reified. So much of our language has become embedded in the institution of the week that the pattern seems more natural than it is.
However, Berger shows how these institutionalized ideas can fade away as they become obsolete. Previous conceptions of the week have already dissolved into the background or been added to the already extensive framework of the week, as seen in the names of the days of the week. With the changing nature of time due to interconnected worldwide civilizations and the meaninglessness of earth timescales in space, the language of the week may eventually become archaic and the structure will diminish by itself.



Solutions
For the numerous reasons listed above, I propose changing the number of days in the week to six, by dropping Tuesday. We now have a week easily evenly divided in halves and thirds. With a six day week, we can have five weeks a month for a total of thirty days, a very normal length of time for a month, with minimal alterations to the current calendar required, and every day of the new week is uniformly the same with every other month, so that it may be ignored all together if so desired. However, we still have those pesky five and a quarter days in the year. Let’s have those days be extra floating holidays, outside the week formula and no body works on them or have that be the current nonproductive week between Christmas and New Years, or sprinkle them across the calendar year.
Now the whole point of this is efficiency and relaxation. Currently there are 52 weeks and 104 weekend days in the year. My idea would make 60 weeks and 120 weekends in the year, reducing the excess work of the population. Or to improve organic solidarity, we can also have jobs where people work 3 days on and 3 off, enabling the widened economic possibilities of regular three-day weekends and enabling someone else to work your exact position while you are gone, simultaneously increasing job output and quality of live. Even better, peoples weekends in whatever form can be staggered, enabling people on their time off to have access to the goods and services of those still working. The economic potentials are enormous!
No matter what solution is chosen, the power structure known as the week needs to be challenged and minimized as mindless bureaucratic structure. Its dominance in our lives affects in every aspect, from work to religion to medications. Fortunately, as the structure is tied into the concept of the day, as the importance of the day decreases due to the shift towards organic solidarity in the economic structure and the expansion of the human race exposes us to extraterrestrial rotational cycles, the concept of the week may fade away entirely, leaving humans with something akin to the Star Trek notion of the Stardate.


Works Cited

Lemert, Charles. Social Theory : The Multicultural and Classical Readings, 3rd
Edition. Westview Press, 2004
Ritzter, George and Goodman, Douglas J. Classical Sociological Theory, 4th
Edition. McGraw-Hill, 2004