Google boss Larry Page recently called for the end of the conventional 40-hour working week. Some new research suggests this could have more profound cultural effects than generally thought.

Anne-Laure Sellier and Tamar Avnet primed people to choose between organizing some jobs in "clock-time" (scheduling a specific job at a specific time) or in "event-time" (doing a job until you reach a natural break). They found that the choice led to two big pyschological differences.

First, clock-timers were more likely to have an external locus of control; they were more likely to see their lives as determined by fate or powerful others. Event-timers, on the other hand, tended to have an internal locus, regarding themselves as in control of their own fate.

If you regard the clock as your master, you might well come to regard other external things as your boss too.

Secondly, clock-timers were less able to savour positive emotions than event-timers - perhaps because if you have an eye on the clock you are less likely to lose yourself in a job and so enjoy flow.

As one of the lucky few who has been able to escape the office and so move from clock-time to event-time, I can corroborate these effects.

Here, though, we need some history. One key feature of the emergence of industrial capitalism was that bosses replaced event-time with clock-time. As E.P. Thompson describes (pdf), pre-industrial workers were event-timers; they would milk the cows, plough or weave or observe Saint Monday as required by the competing demands of the job and personal whim:

The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their lives.

Over several generations, this pattern was replaced with the discipline of the clock. But as Sellier and Avnet suggest, this replacement had some cultural and psychological effects which its authors did not intend. As Marx said: "The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life."

And herein lies the thing. If Mr Page is right and/or if some combination of robots and a citizens basic income create a post-scarcity economy in which we are no less subject to the tyranny of the clock, this could lead to big cultural changes which we have barely begun to think about.